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LillyDragon
October 29th, 2012, 10:29 PM
I actually had to use Unity for a little while some weeks ago, after replacing my 32-bit Xubuntu install for 64-bit Ubuntu, (Xubuntu's ISO doesn't come with WUBI, so I needed plain ol' Ubuntu until I installed XFCE again from the official PPA.) and I gotta say, I had it all figured out in 5 minutes tops. A bit quirky, but not impossible to learn.

I navigated it quite fluently, despite how much I hated it with every fiber of my being when Unity first made its rounds. I'd go so far as to say it's viable and eye-catching for the desktop whether you're using a mouse, tablet, or touchscreen. If you're looking for something different from what even Microsoft is offering in Windows 8, Unity's got it.

That's not to say I'm sticking with it, though. While it's way more intuitive, functional, and easier on the eyes than Gnome 3, I just don't feel it's customizable enough for my needs. Customization is one of the reasons why I love Linux so much, because I can tweak the desktop to be as lightning fast for computing as I can get with a mouse straight out of the box. I get that and so much more from XFCE.

***

So long story short, I don't feel much hate for Unity anymore, just a preference to something else for a more efficient and flexible computing experience. Might give it another serious trial once more options are available on the user's end. Gnome 3, however, I may gladly bash until Kingdom come, but that's a whole other can of worms for another topic. So how do you guys feel about Unity now?

grahammechanical
October 29th, 2012, 10:46 PM
I have the Launcher set for Autohide. The top panel set for transparent. And I now have wall to wall, top to bottom photographic wallpaper. I like the clean look and the wide, open space of the desktop. But then again I am not someone who likes to endlessly modify the desktop

RLDr
October 29th, 2012, 11:06 PM
So how do you guys feel about Unity now?
From the very beginning I don't started to hate anything without knowing something well enough.:P
It was just a test for me. But now I can say easily that I like unity more than before. Superb desktop idea of Canonical Ltd, simple & easy to use.:)

mamamia88
October 29th, 2012, 11:08 PM
I have the Launcher set for Autohide. The top panel set for transparent. And I now have wall to wall, top to bottom photographic wallpaper. I like the clean look and the wide, open space of the desktop. But then again I am not someone who likes to endlessly modify the desktop

i like the idea of having a dock with most used applications that also has a search feature built into it unfortunately i think gnome-shell handles it much better. for example i can disable the hot corner with an extension making it so that the dock only shows itself when i want it too. this and using the super key to bring up the search feature as well as putting a window list on the top and having the scale feature built into the activities button makes it a much better desktop imo.

fred1084
October 29th, 2012, 11:17 PM
Hi. Unity has always been usable to me. I setup the desktop a bit minimal and have recently installed the dockbarx bottom bar as well as the launcher set on autohide. It all just works. Cheers

Mikeb85
October 30th, 2012, 12:31 AM
Unity has been my favourite DE ever since I've used it. The launcher works (and autohides), and the dash is very useful. I like the notifications, the global menu, everything just looks great and works.

jrog
October 30th, 2012, 12:34 AM
It looks and feels great. The performance could be better, though.

jerome1232
October 30th, 2012, 12:36 AM
I love it. I'm growing to like HUD (can be improved, seems I have to know a little about the menu structure of any given program to use it effectivly) I like the search driven dash (I don't have to search through menu's to find applications) I love the global menu, saves some vertical space on small displays. I love that I almost have zero panel space wasted with the global menu and a hidden launcher.

The largest con for me is it's a little chuggy on my netbook, I wish it could slim down a bit.

screaminj3sus
October 30th, 2012, 12:48 AM
I think unity is coming along quite nicely, its an excellent laptop interface.

Copper Bezel
October 30th, 2012, 03:33 AM
Last I used it, I didn't quite settle in, much as I wanted to. Feature-wise, it's ahead of Gnome Shell by far. Workspace management is still terrible compared against Shell and effects are still smoother beyond comparison, because Compiz is still Compiz and Mutter is still Mutter.

I don't tweak for the sake of it anymore, but there are a few details of the interface that really bug me. I do wish I could change those, in some sense, but actually I just wish they'd been better worked out in the first place.

I intend to get a new desktop soon, and I'll probably make the switch then. Unity's feature set is getting difficult to ignore. The integration between HUD and Tomboy alone almost pulled me over last I tried it.

gerowen
October 30th, 2012, 04:22 AM
I left Ubuntu when Unity was first introduced because I kind of felt like a lot of my customization abilities were taken away. On top of that, on my old Toshiba Satellite the whole thing seemed to run really slow compared to earlier releases, even when I kicked it over to "Classic Gnome". I've been using Debian for the past few years with good results, and while initially I used the constant upgrades as an excuse for leaving Ubuntu, I'm thinking about coming back. I'm not particularly unhappy with Debian as far as stability goes, but there are a lot of little things about Ubuntu that just seem to make it a little more user friendly, and software updates seem to hit Ubuntu faster. I have an extra laptop I'm going to throw it on, and even after running Debian for so long, I've noticed that I really don't do that much desktop customization. I've added some shortcuts and applets to my top Gnome 2 panels, but that's about it. The next major release of Debian is going XFCE so I'm going to have to get used to not having those around anyway, so I figured give the latest Ubuntu another try.

mamamia88
October 30th, 2012, 04:34 AM
I left Ubuntu when Unity was first introduced because I kind of felt like a lot of my customization abilities were taken away. On top of that, on my old Toshiba Satellite the whole thing seemed to run really slow compared to earlier releases, even when I kicked it over to "Classic Gnome". I've been using Debian for the past few years with good results, and while initially I used the constant upgrades as an excuse for leaving Ubuntu, I'm thinking about coming back. I'm not particularly unhappy with Debian as far as stability goes, but there are a lot of little things about Ubuntu that just seem to make it a little more user friendly, and software updates seem to hit Ubuntu faster. I have an extra laptop I'm going to throw it on, and even after running Debian for so long, I've noticed that I really don't do that much desktop customization. I've added some shortcuts and applets to my top Gnome 2 panels, but that's about it. The next major release of Debian is going XFCE so I'm going to have to get used to not having those around anyway, so I figured give the latest Ubuntu another try. all this talk of unity has made me want to give it a try again. too bad i just installed arch on an ssd so only have about 45gb for home so don't feel like dedicating space to another os. wonder how it would run on an intel atom with 2gb ram and ssd? tried compiling it via yaourt but gave up

Copper Bezel
October 30th, 2012, 04:41 AM
It'll run decently on netbook spec. That's what it was designed around, after all. I've only ever run it on an Atom with 2GB ram and an SSD.

HansKisaragi
October 30th, 2012, 04:45 AM
Its slow.. I prefer Cinnamon

mamamia88
October 30th, 2012, 04:52 AM
It'll run decently on netbook spec. That's what it was designed around, after all. I've only ever run it on an Atom with 2GB ram and an SSD.
i'll have to give it a try eventually then. would using it off flash drive show halfway decent performance compared to installing it? like i said i don't have much disk space and can't see the point having multiple distros installed.

pqwoerituytrueiwoq
October 30th, 2012, 05:01 AM
i don't care much for unity, but it does have its uses like small screens (netbook), compiz has gone down hill since 10.04, it only had one bug bother be (has workaround), which is fixed and now i have noticed what feels like dozens
i like customizations and putting my applets where i want them
using xubuntu+compiz
wonder how long it will take for this thread to get locked (always seems to happen with win8 and unity threads)

TheMTtakeover
October 30th, 2012, 05:07 AM
I've added some shortcuts and applets to my top Gnome 2 panels, but that's about it. The next major release of Debian is going XFCE so I'm going to have to get used to not having those around anyway, so I figured give the latest Ubuntu another try.

Can you get that functionality out of MATE? If so why not use that?

toupeiro
October 30th, 2012, 05:28 AM
Wasn't a fan, still not a fan. To each his/her own.

gerowen
October 30th, 2012, 05:32 AM
Can you get that functionality out of MATE? If so why not use that?

Is it usable? I've heard bad things about it like it's full of bugs and not nearly as stable as just regular Gnome 2 for some reason.

PJs Ronin
October 30th, 2012, 05:34 AM
That one feature alone, Unity, nearly pushed me back to using Windows; heresy I know, but that's how much of a retrograde step I feel Unity is.

99.99999% of my computer activity is either mouse based or it's entering text like I'm doing right now. Unity helps none of those activities and compels me to use the keyboard more than I previously did. That is not a productivity gain in my books. I also have some specific issues with Unity (although I will be the first to admit I'm not a Unity genius) viz:

I'm not sure which flavour of Unity I was running, but there were times I could not get rid of, or hide, the unity launcher... thus cluttering the desktop,
my bottom panel would disappear and I thus lost access to my desktop cube listing. This becomes a real problem when an application on another face of the cube is screeming for attention and I can't get to it. Sure, I know I can go to the 'switcher' on the Unity launcher but that triples the number of mouse actions to get to the appropriate cube face.

Today was the 4th time this year I have tried to come to grips with Unity and the 4th time my computer (and me) has been messed up. If Shuttleworth thinks this is the future of Ubuntu then I am super glad that today I downloaded Mint.

/psychotic rant

mamamia88
October 30th, 2012, 05:50 AM
That one feature alone, Unity, nearly pushed me back to using *******; heresy I know, but that's how much of a retrograde step I feel Unity is.

99.99999% of my computer activity is either mouse based or it's entering text like I'm doing right now. Unity helps none of those activities and compels me to use the keyboard more than I previously did. That is not a productivity gain in my books. I also have some specific issues with Unity (although I will be the first to admit I'm not a Unity genius) viz:

I'm not sure which flavour of Unity I was running, but there were times I could not get rid of, or hide, the unity launcher... thus cluttering the desktop,
my bottom panel would disappear and I thus lost access to my desktop cube listing. This becomes a real problem when an application on another face of the cube is screeming for attention and I can't get to it. Sure, I know I can go to the 'switcher' on the Unity launcher but that triples the number of mouse actions to get to the appropriate cube face.

Today was the 4th time this year I have tried to come to grips with Unity and the 4th time my computer (and me) has been screwed. If Shuttleworth thinks this is the future of Ubuntu then I am super glad that today I downloaded Mint.

/psychotic rant
can you give examples of how unity dissuades you from using a mouse and keyboard? I'm not quite sure i understand? why not use the scale funtion of compiz to get to your application "screaming for attention on another face of the cube? or why not click on the application of the minimized icon on the dock? and you mentioned a bottom panel? unity doesn't ship with a bottom panel by default. nor does it have the desktop cube plugin enabled by default. it seems like your complaints about unity are from you trying to use unity in a different way than canonical wants you to use it. In that case you should use a desktop environment that works the way you want it too. If i try and manually shift on a automatic transmission and i wreck my car who's fault is it really? If i wanted a manual i would have bought a manual. You can't really judge a window manager when you are trying to fit a square peg in a round whole.

LillyDragon
October 30th, 2012, 06:05 AM
I have to agree with mamamia88 on that one; Unity doesn't seem like it would cooperate very well with some of Compiz's more advanced features. (Come to think of it I can't even remember the last time I heard someone bring up the 3D Desktop cube!) That would be much better suited for other environments like XFCE or maybe KDE.


wonder how long it will take for this thread to get locked (always seems to happen with win8 and unity threads)

Only if it becomes filled with more negative criticism than polling the general preferences of other users would I see this being dumped or split to Recurring Discussion. Unity is still a little rough around the edges at times, as a few people have already mentioned, but that will get better with time like with anything on Linux that is actively being developed.

PJs Ronin
October 30th, 2012, 07:10 AM
can you give examples of how unity dissuades you from using a mouse and keyboard?Perhaps I was not clear enough. I meant that Unity required me to make greater use of the keyboard in lieu of the mouse. Like I said, I'm no expert but with my Unity I had no access to the 'traditional' (you'll probably hate that word) menu for apps in accessories, games etc. I found I had to go to Dash, type the first couple of letters and then the app would list.


why not use the scale funtion of compiz to get to your application "screaming for attention on another face of the cube? or why not click on the application of the minimized icon on the dock? I had no minimized icon on the dock. The 'cube face' I needed was in an app running in a VM and all that appeared on the dock was the VM app (virtualbox) and not the app itself. Clicking the 'docked' VM icon just brought up Virtualbox and not the app.

and you mentioned a bottom panel? unity doesn't ship with a bottom panel by default... nor does it have the desktop cube plugin enabled by default.I had these aspects installed/active prior to trying Unity again. I don't think it's appropriate that Unity retrogrades my DE just because it wants me to go in a different direction.
it seems like your complaints about unity are from you trying to use unity in a different way than canonical wants you to use it.I totally agree with you. However, I have always been of a mind to make my computer do what I want it to do, not what a developer thinks I want it to do.

Interestingly, after my first rant I installed Cinnamon. Happy camper right here folks. Cinnamon is fast, lean and smiles at those who love a mouse.

Don't get me wrong, I think there is a future for Unity... but that future is more likely to be on hardware that depends on touch.

kow777
October 30th, 2012, 09:08 AM
After using Natty when it was first released, I was really sceptical about Unity. I used it for a while until I was irritated with the bug that caused the system to lock on my T420. I have since installed 12.04 and love it. I do not get as good battery life as I used to get in Natty, but that isn't Unity's fault. Unity produces one of the most beautiful desktops I have come across. It looks very complete and modern. The "search" feature of the dash is amazing. I like being able to search for what I want and run it. I have had to adapt to Unity quite a bit, but have gotten used to it. I still miss Gnome 2.x, but until 12.04 is out of support, I am not going to switch to a replacement.

My experience with the current release of Unity (whatever version is included in 12.10) has been less than perfect. While running it in VirutalBox, I find it slow and not worth the upgrade. It didn't seem to add many things that would benefit me. I also am very paranoid over the "activity recording" of the new features. I don't like anyone logging what I do, and if these types of features stay, I will find a replacement to my once beloved Ubuntu.

Overall, I think that Unity has come a far way and is a big competitor against the other window managers and desktop environments. I hope the resource usage is addressed and things get better with time.

kow777
October 30th, 2012, 09:13 AM
I totally agree with you. However, I have always been of a mind to make my computer do what I want it to do, not what a developer thinks I want it to do.


I agree. I liked what I used to be able to do with Gnome. I wasn't locked into the customization that was included with the environment. I could shape my desktop to fit me, not the other way around.

exploder
October 30th, 2012, 09:21 AM
I like Unity, it's different. I like the idea of a launcher and the dash has kind of grown on me. I used MyUnity on my 12.04 x64 installs to make the top panel semi-transparent and the launcher look like the one in 12.10. I am happy with the way Unity looks and works. Oh, and I love the global menus, everyone that has tried Unity on my computer has commented how cool they are.

Unity has really come a long way in a short time. I am looking forward to seeing the new icons and other improvements that are coming.

gerowen
October 30th, 2012, 09:44 AM
That one feature alone, Unity, nearly pushed me back to using *******; heresy I know, but that's how much of a retrograde step I feel Unity is.

99.99999% of my computer activity is either mouse based or it's entering text like I'm doing right now. Unity helps none of those activities and compels me to use the keyboard more than I previously did. That is not a productivity gain in my books. I also have some specific issues with Unity (although I will be the first to admit I'm not a Unity genius) viz:

I'm not sure which flavour of Unity I was running, but there were times I could not get rid of, or hide, the unity launcher... thus cluttering the desktop,
my bottom panel would disappear and I thus lost access to my desktop cube listing. This becomes a real problem when an application on another face of the cube is screeming for attention and I can't get to it. Sure, I know I can go to the 'switcher' on the Unity launcher but that triples the number of mouse actions to get to the appropriate cube face.

Today was the 4th time this year I have tried to come to grips with Unity and the 4th time my computer (and me) has been screwed. If Shuttleworth thinks this is the future of Ubuntu then I am super glad that today I downloaded Mint.

/psychotic rant

CTRL+ALT+Left and right arrow keys will page you to other sides of the cube as well, just thought I'd let you know in case you didn't already.

Paqman
October 30th, 2012, 10:03 AM
I've never had a problem with Unity, I used it as a netbook interface before it was on the desktop, so I was used to it already. It was always a great interface on small wide screens (ie: what it was originally designed for).

The Dash is a lot better in Quantal. It was annoyingly slow before and I used Synapse instead (which is very fast). But now that it's a bit quicker I've switched to using the Dash as it comes with a lot of cool new features like Google Docs integration.

Jakin
October 30th, 2012, 10:37 AM
I only have one "little issue" with Unity (gnome3 as well) its a small thing overall, but major to me.

I just plain do not like the Dash, good for some, but i like a traditional menu.

stinkeye
October 30th, 2012, 11:37 AM
Never had a major problem with unity.
Like all DE's theres a way to make it work for you.
I find the dash useful for some things but prefer to use kupfer as my app launcher.(Can use classic menu indicator if you prefer the old menu)
I like to mostly use the mouse so using easystroke mouse gestures
to perform all sorts of tasks suits me.
Not really much difference than before unity.
I run compiz cube and have a launcher and a panel with indicators.

fontis
October 30th, 2012, 12:49 PM
My initial reaction to it has remained the same regardless of how many times I've tried it and even used it extensively.
I'm currently still forcing myself to use Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity but really... I just don't like it.

I think it's flawed in a few ways and I'll explain why.
I think the Dash is a bit too disorganizing and frankly the whole new "menu approach" that Gnome and Unity have taken is just counter-productive. I much prefer the way things were with Gnome2 or the Start menu in Windows or even the menu in KDE.

That aside, I think it's a huge flaw that Unity still relies on Compiz instead of just being standalone to begin with. Even though Unity is clearly better now than it was in Natty, it's still not there and it will never be unless Compiz is overhauled or Unity is just made into something more standalone.

I also think it's really silly that the Launcher is stuck on the left side and you can't move it without h4x.

But the worst thing right now is the top panel. I just don't understand the point of having a top panel forced on the screen which seemingly serves no purpose whatsoever other than to host your notification bar and that wretched global menu. It's such a huge design flaw for a desktop environment. You basically have two static elements on your screen at all times instead of just simply one.

I wish they would just remove the top panel completely and morph the notifications into the Launcher panel instead.

That being said, it IS clearly functional and I'm sure a lot of people don't feel the way I do and they enjoy it the way it is. But these are just a few things on my mind :)

mamamia88
October 30th, 2012, 01:00 PM
Perhaps I was not clear enough. I meant that Unity required me to make greater use of the keyboard in lieu of the mouse. Like I said, I'm no expert but with my Unity I had no access to the 'traditional' (you'll probably hate that word) menu for apps in accessories, games etc. I found I had to go to Dash, type the first couple of letters and then the app would list.

I had no minimized icon on the dock. The 'cube face' I needed was in an app running in a VM and all that appeared on the dock was the VM app (virtualbox) and not the app itself. Clicking the 'docked' VM icon just brought up Virtualbox and not the app.
I had these aspects installed/active prior to trying Unity again. I don't think it's appropriate that Unity retrogrades my DE just because it wants me to go in a different direction.I totally agree with you. However, I have always been of a mind to make my computer do what I want it to do, not what a developer thinks I want it to do.

Interestingly, after my first rant I installed Cinnamon. Happy camper right here folks. Cinnamon is fast, lean and smiles at those who love a mouse.

Don't get me wrong, I think there is a future for Unity... but that future is more likely to be on hardware that depends on touch.
Me too. But Canonical is trying to make a desktop that stands out from the crowd. Unity isn't meant for you and me who like to tweak the desktop alot. Personally I find shell a pretty good middle ground between "traditional" and "modern". With plugins you can have a beautiful desktop but still have some of the features you miss from the old paradigm of desktops. Also I think that the firefox method of customizing your desktop should have been done a long time ago.

Linuxisfast
October 30th, 2012, 01:06 PM
I have various machines running xfce, gnome and kde but find Ubuntu to be the most productive, the indicators, the easy access of the side bar and quick find of dash all work nicely for me.

neu5eeCh
October 30th, 2012, 02:41 PM
Interesting discussion. I recently thought I'd try Unity again. I tried installing it on my brand new Acer Aspire One Ao722. Unity, whether because of Compiz or otherwise, was slow, buggy and completely collapsed post-install. I would get a complete purple screen or the screen would be split (left half on the right, right half on the left). I nuked the Unity install and tried Xubuntu/Voyager. Everything has been smooth as butter. I've been using Xubuntu on all my systems and have grown to love it's flexibility, refinements and conveniences.

Unity, however, would have been good on the Acer, having such a small screen.

I mention the installation debacle because I have a hunch that installing CCSM is what screwed Unity over. The reason I installed CCSM was for one feature -- the grid grab bars (for resizing windows). One of the nice XFCE refinements missing in Unity (as an example) is that with a keystroke XFCE will place my pointer on the window's corner and let me immediately resize it without having to hunt for the corner. I click and move. As soon as I installed CCSM, I was no longer able to hold down the Super Key in order to see hotkeys. Instead, all my apps on the launcher were numbered. (I recall that Canonical wanted to remove CCSM from the repos.) So, I could have removed CCSM but would have lacked the functionality and ease of use of XFCE.

The most annoying feature concerning Unity (and one that could be easily remedied) is choosing apps in the lens. Why oh, why oh, why (when I type in Terminal for example) do I then have to navigate to the Terminal Icon!?! This feature is so obtuse and annoyingly easy to remedy that it alone turns me off Unity. Gnome Shell's Activities overview is far superior in this respect. Like Synapse, I can type Terminal and hit return. Done. Unity should anticipate the software that I want, like Synapse or Gnome Shell, and hightlight it. C'mon boys.

I don't mind the global menu but I don't see why Unity hides it. Auto-hiding the menu is utterly pointless. It's an affectation that we should be able to switch on or off.

Another major annoyance remains the launcher's lack of responsiveness. I don't like having to see it. It's an in-your-face affectation. It kills real-estate, makes the desktop feel claustrophobic and offers little to no useful information. When autohide is applied, however, the responsiveness of the launcher remains amateurishly problematic. Sometimes it pops up, sometimes I have to bang the side of the screen until it scurries out of its hiding place.

So, my feelings? I want Unity to succeed. I like everything Ubuntu has done for the Linux Desktop. However, Unity (in my experience) remains half-baked and stubbornly recalcitrant in areas that would seem easily remedied.

Linuxisfast
October 30th, 2012, 03:13 PM
Interesting discussion. I recently thought I'd try Unity again. I tried installing it on my brand new Acer Aspire One Ao722. Unity, whether because of Compiz or otherwise, was slow, buggy and completely collapsed post-install. I would get a complete purple screen or the screen would be split (left half on the right, right half on the left). I nuked the Unity install and tried Xubuntu/Voyager. Everything has been smooth as butter. I've been using Xubuntu on all my systems and have grown to love it's flexibility, refinements and conveniences.

Unity, however, would have been good on the Acer, having such a small screen.

I mention the installation debacle because I have a hunch that installing CCSM is what screwed Unity over. The reason I installed CCSM was for one feature -- the grid grab bars (for resizing windows). One of the nice XFCE refinements missing in Unity (as an example) is that with a keystroke XFCE will place my pointer on the window's corner and let me immediately resize it without having to hunt for the corner. I click and move. As soon as I installed CCSM, I was no longer able to hold down the Super Key in order to see hotkeys. Instead, all my apps on the launcher were numbered. (I recall that Canonical wanted to remove CCSM from the repos.) So, I could have removed CCSM but would have lacked the functionality and ease of use of XFCE.

The most annoying feature concerning Unity (and one that could be easily remedied) is choosing apps in the lens. Why oh, why oh, why (when I type in Terminal for example) do I then have to navigate to the Terminal Icon!?! This feature is so obtuse and annoyingly easy to remedy that it alone turns me off Unity. Gnome Shell's Activities overview is far superior in this respect. Like Synapse, I can type Terminal and hit return. Done. Unity should anticipate the software that I want, like Synapse or Gnome Shell, and hightlight it. C'mon boys.

I don't mind the global menu but I don't see why Unity hides it. Auto-hiding the menu is utterly pointless. It's an affectation that we should be able to switch on or off.

Another major annoyance remains the launcher's lack of responsiveness. I don't like having to see it. It's an in-your-face affectation. It kills real-estate, makes the desktop feel claustrophobic and offers little to no useful information. When autohide is applied, however, the responsiveness of the launcher remains amateurishly problematic. Sometimes it pops up, sometimes I have to bang the side of the screen until it scurries out of its hiding place.

So, my feelings? I want Unity to succeed. I like everything Ubuntu has done for the Linux Desktop. However, Unity (in my experience) remains half-baked and stubbornly recalcitrant in areas that would seem easily remedied.

Its an AMD Fusion chip netbook if I am not mistaken, very similar to the ASUS 1215B I have, in my case Unity works fine as long as I enable the AMD Catalyst via hardware driver, since 12.10 has the latest Catalyst, it works quite well actually, my system has 2GB RAM though.

Linuxratty
October 30th, 2012, 03:17 PM
Wasn't a fan, still not a fan. To each his/her own.

Same here..Don't like keyboard short cuts. I prefer to point and click..The less typing I have to do,the better.
I like the old fashioned drop down menus..Still using Fallback.

jrog
October 30th, 2012, 03:20 PM
I have a hunch that installing CCSM is what screwed Unity over.
Not sure about that. In my case, at least, I have had CCSM installed for quite some time and have been having a generally great Unity experience nevertheless.


The most annoying feature concerning Unity (and one that could be easily remedied) is choosing apps in the lens. Why oh, why oh, why (when I type in Terminal for example) do I then have to navigate to the Terminal Icon!?! This feature is so obtuse and annoyingly easy to remedy that it alone turns me off Unity. Gnome Shell's Activities overview is far superior in this respect. Like Synapse, I can type Terminal and hit return. Done. Unity should anticipate the software that I want, like Synapse or Gnome Shell, and hightlight it. C'mon boys.Unity does this; I just double-checked. I hit the Windows key to open Dash, I type "terminal," I hit enter, and a terminal launches. I think you must have been experiencing another bug here. (EDIT, in light of the comment below this one: Maybe the problem is that the result is not highlighted in the Dash, so you didn't realize you could just hit enter to launch the first result?)


Another major annoyance remains the launcher's lack of responsiveness. I don't like having to see it. It's an in-your-face affectation. It kills real-estate, makes the desktop feel claustrophobic and offers little to no useful information.This is probably just a matter of personal preference, but I feel very differently about this. On widescreen displays, anyway, the launcher feels (and looks) great -- it is probably one of the highlights of the Unity experience for me. I can make the icons small enough to not take up much space (and it is space that is not really used up on widescreen displays anyway, since the launcher is to the left rather than on the bottom or top), while still being able to quickly launch applications and multitask between them. I can easily see what I have open and so on, too. De gustibus non est disputandum, though!

Paqman
October 30th, 2012, 03:21 PM
The most annoying feature concerning Unity (and one that could be easily remedied) is choosing apps in the lens. Why oh, why oh, why (when I type in Terminal for example) do I then have to navigate to the Terminal Icon!?! This feature is so obtuse and annoyingly easy to remedy that it alone turns me off Unity. Gnome Shell's Activities overview is far superior in this respect. Like Synapse, I can type Terminal and hit return. Done. Unity should anticipate the software that I want, like Synapse or Gnome Shell, and hightlight it. C'mon boys.


That used to annoy me too, until I realised that you can actually just hit enter and it launches the first result. It may have been like that all along and I was getting annoyed with it for nothing, which I find a bit embarrassing.

coffeecat
October 30th, 2012, 03:26 PM
(when I type in Terminal for example) do I then have to navigate to the Terminal Icon!?!

Type terminal and then ENTER, or simply type ter and click on the terminal icon that appears in the dash. Even just 't' or 'te' typed in the dash offers me the terminal. I fail to see what is troubling you.

I would think many forum members using Unity would have pinned terminal to the launcher anyway!

EDIT:


until I realised that you can actually just hit enter and it launches the first result.

Or that. :)

johnnybgoode83
October 30th, 2012, 03:41 PM
Features-wise, I feel the Unity is pretty complete now. In my opinion, the next two releases should be all about stability and performance with a features freeze. There are still a few issue to iron out.

jerome1232
October 30th, 2012, 05:33 PM
Regarding one comment that complained Unity was intended for a touch screen, while complaining about it's heavy reliance on the keyboard in the same paragraph.

Am I the only one that sees a disconnect there?

fontis
October 30th, 2012, 05:38 PM
Regarding one comment that complained Unity was intended for a touch screen, while complaining about it's heavy reliance on the keyboard in the same paragraph.

Am I the only one that sees a disconnect there?

Not really a disconnect mate..
I mean, for a touch screen you would emphasize the App-Drawer kind of view of your stuff so you can easily "flick through" pages of applications with your fingers. This of course takes way more time than pointing through menus on a desktop platform so the middle-ground is to implement a search function so you're forced to "type" what you're looking for.

mamamia88
October 30th, 2012, 05:47 PM
Not really a disconnect mate..
I mean, for a touch screen you would emphasize the App-Drawer kind of view of your stuff so you can easily "flick through" pages of applications with your fingers. This of course takes way more time than pointing through menus on a desktop platform so the middle-ground is to implement a search function so you're forced to "type" what you're looking for.

who needs to flick through menus? if i want to launch an app it's much quicker just to start spelling the name

wojox
October 30th, 2012, 06:12 PM
I would think many forum members using Unity would have pinned terminal to the launcher anyway!

Keyboard Shortcuts FTW :P

fontis
October 30th, 2012, 08:59 PM
who needs to flick through menus? if i want to launch an app it's much quicker just to start spelling the name

I'm only referring to what was quoted above from the person who said he cba using his keyboard.

Anyhow, to counter your question -> Who would want to overhaul and destroy a completely functional UI just to be able to search and launch an application when there's already tons of available apps that offers the same functionality? Synapse, GnomeDo etc :)

JPR65
October 30th, 2012, 09:03 PM
I have unity enabled.. Instead I mostly use compiz effects, cairodock, and the hud--I find that I almost never click on the unity sidebar...the only reason I still have it is because it includes the hud, which I can't get enough of.

GWBouge
October 30th, 2012, 09:08 PM
I suppose I'm one of the few that's liked Unity from the beginning, even in Natty. The one thing I didn't like about it when it was first introduced was the global menu ... but since they added the HUD to it so I can just Alt'n'Search for menu items and stuff in the tray, it really is a great feature and I'm finding more and more ways to use it.

That said, as of 10.04 I had already disabled the panels completely, and ran completely off of two AWN docks and Gnome+Do. With all the options already out there, I found clicking away at the traditional menu and panel system to be increasingly disruptive and irritating. So, by the time Unity came about, I never really had to adapt to it. It complimented the workflow I already had.

rg4w
October 30th, 2012, 10:26 PM
When I first heard about Unity I was very excited, but the initial implementation in 11.04 left me going back to 10.10. But by 11.10 I came to like it, and in 12.10 it rocks.

The only thing I'd like to see now is a flyout menu for the desktop switcher icon so I can go directly to a specific desktop in one move rather than the two-click move I do now.

Other than that, I'm pretty happy with Unity these days. I've even gotten over my fear of the concealed menus. :)

localhost8080
October 30th, 2012, 10:29 PM
I like unity :D
it reminds me of windowmaker and my mac with the dock at the side :D

all i need now is a nexus7 or one of those microsoft tablet things to experiment with to see what its like for touch :D

Eggnog
October 30th, 2012, 11:00 PM
I haven't chimed in around here in a long, long time but I have to say I have grown to really like Unity. At first I was like many others, initially disgruntled because someone moved my cheese. But rather than storm off to look at some other distro or stubbornly remove Unity, I decided to give it a chance.

I've tested Cinnamon and MATE on a Mint VM, and I really like Cinnamon, but I'm sticking with Unity and Ubuntu. I think Unity will turn out to be a good move by Canonical when all the smoke clears. Heck, I'll probably end up with a Ubuntu phone and tablet, I would imagine.

Eggnog
October 30th, 2012, 11:05 PM
The only thing I'd like to see now is a flyout menu for the desktop switcher icon so I can go directly to a specific desktop in one move rather than the two-click move I do now.


I would echo this sentiment unless there's a "quick switch" system I haven't found yet.

Tibuda
October 30th, 2012, 11:21 PM
My unity hate is still very hot

screaminj3sus
October 30th, 2012, 11:34 PM
I would echo this sentiment unless there's a "quick switch" system I haven't found yet.

ctrl + alt + arrow keys.

x-shaney-x
October 31st, 2012, 12:05 AM
I was a fan of unity from the very start.
i have watched it mature (to an extent) and although I haven't always liked some aspects of it, I have given it a chance and usually things grow on me.
Most things that annoyed people didn't bother me (such as button position) but some did, such as global menu and peek-a-boo menus but those did grow on me.
The biggest issue I had was the removal of dodge which I still find a bonkers decision and had to resort to a PPA to get it back.

However, my opinion has changed drastically recently.
As others have warmed to it after initial hatred, I have gone from being a fan to hating it for quite a few reasons.

I think they are making wrong decisions and making decisions for the wrong reasons.
I'm not going to go into details but unlike some who will endlessly criticize every aspect but carry on using it, I am voting with my feet and moving on.

rg4w
November 2nd, 2012, 11:36 PM
I would echo this sentiment unless there's a "quick switch" system I haven't found yet.
It seemed like a fun project to add a workspace switcher right-click menu to that Launcher icon, but after prowling around my drive I can't find the desktop file for that.

Do you know where I might find it?

The instructions for adding a Quick Menu to icons are pretty good over at developer.ubuntu.com, and I'd love to play with this if only I could find the .desktop file to modify.

Random_Dude
November 2nd, 2012, 11:52 PM
I don't like the interface. And even if I did, it's very slow.

Eggnog
November 3rd, 2012, 02:10 AM
I said in a previous post that I tried Mint with Cinnamon and MATE but I'm sticking with Unity and Ubuntu. Unfortunately, I lied. I recently installed and tested Cinnamon on my Ubuntu desktop using 12.04 and it just runs superbly. So I'm sticking with Ubuntu on my desktop, but I think I prefer Cinnamon for the time being.

I still like Unity, and have no issues with it, but I think Cinnamon is better oriented toward my desktop. No Unity hate here. I will be happy to use Unity when Ubuntu goes mobile.

zer010
November 3rd, 2012, 02:51 AM
Never hated it, but it's slow on my hw. I gave it a go, but I just couldn't get used to the menus/lenses. I'm sure it's changed since 11.10, but I'll give it time to mature and that'll give me time to find new hardware...

eggdeng
November 3rd, 2012, 05:46 PM
But ah, the ability to configure things. And I have wobbly windows again.

- Linus Torvalds (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DbmEE8kXLDA)

stinkeye
November 4th, 2012, 01:24 AM
But ah, the ability to configure things. And I have wobbly windows again.

- Linus Torvalds (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DbmEE8kXLDA)

You can still have cube and wobbly windows in 12.10...just need to install
compiz-plugins.

speedwell68
November 4th, 2012, 02:00 AM
I was never a Unity hater, I decided to leave it be when it was in it's infancy as I never found it to be particularly complete. I went over to Lubuntu on my Laptop and Netbook and Mint with Gnome 3 on my desktop. The desktop is due an upgrade so I think I'll give it a whirl then.

Gremlinzzz
November 4th, 2012, 02:39 AM
:popcorn:I agree with most of this video:popcorn:
Ubuntu vs Xubuntu and More

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T972LxCS1h0

Jakin
November 4th, 2012, 10:17 AM
:popcorn:I agree with most of this video:popcorn:
Ubuntu vs Xubuntu and More

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T972LxCS1h0

X-ubuntu? All this time i've been calling it "zoo-buntu"..

sffvba[e0rt
November 4th, 2012, 10:38 AM
X-ubuntu? All this time i've been calling it "zoo-buntu"..

I am pretty sure there will be many people calling it one or the other... neither being right wrong.


404

Antoon Stessels
November 4th, 2012, 12:45 PM
The most annoying feature concerning Unity (and one that could be easily remedied) is choosing apps in the lens. Why oh, why oh, why (when I type in Terminal for example) do I then have to navigate to the Terminal Icon!?! This feature is so obtuse and annoyingly easy to remedy that it alone turns me off Unity. Gnome Shell's Activities overview is far superior in this respect. Like Synapse, I can type Terminal and hit return. Done. Unity should anticipate the software that I want, like Synapse or Gnome Shell, and hightlight it. C'mon boys.

It may not look like it, but Unity does exactly that. Try it: hit dash, type in terminal and hit return... It WILL open your program (although in many cases it will also give you more options and - true - will not highlight your probable first choice.

Antoon Stessels
November 4th, 2012, 02:16 PM
I'm the kind of person that cannot settle on one choice, so I tested Unity, Gnome 3, Xubuntu, KDE, ... and what have you, not once, but many times over and again.

In fact, this thread makes me want to test Xubuntu again right this very moment, but I'm going to try to fight the urge for now.

The thing is: I always come back to Unity. For the simple reason that it has features that I've grown used to (dash, HUD, the notification bubbles, ...) and immediately miss when launching e.g. into Gnome 3.

I do agree what someone told earlier, that Unity has to cut loose from Compiz and evolve into sth more standalone. Then Canonical should try to make it more stable and quick.

This is a huge priority to me. Apart from that, I am a Unity fanboy.

leclerc65
November 4th, 2012, 05:02 PM
I can never live with Unity. My main desktop is now running Maya Mate, all other are running Maya XFCE (I also hate AWN , so no Xubuntu for me), Lubuntu or Puppy depending on their hardware power.
Yes, you can tailor the desktop to your liking with Ubuntu, but
it's never stable. I tried Ubuntu 12.04 with LXDE for 5 months, but my main desktop keeps crashing (with Thunderbird and Nautilus) so I gave up and defected.
Habit dies hard, I still prefer this Forums to Mint's.:(

Ashtonford
November 4th, 2012, 05:42 PM
That one feature alone, Unity, nearly pushed me back to using *******; heresy I know, but that's how much of a retrograde step I feel Unity is.

99.99999% of my computer activity is either mouse based or it's entering text like I'm doing right now. Unity helps none of those activities and compels me to use the keyboard more than I previously did. That is not a productivity gain in my books. I also have some specific issues with Unity (although I will be the first to admit I'm not a Unity genius) viz:

I'm not sure which flavour of Unity I was running, but there were times I could not get rid of, or hide, the unity launcher... thus cluttering the desktop,
my bottom panel would disappear and I thus lost access to my desktop cube listing. This becomes a real problem when an application on another face of the cube is screeming for attention and I can't get to it. Sure, I know I can go to the 'switcher' on the Unity launcher but that triples the number of mouse actions to get to the appropriate cube face.

Today was the 4th time this year I have tried to come to grips with Unity and the 4th time my computer (and me) has been screwed. If Shuttleworth thinks this is the future of Ubuntu then I am super glad that today I downloaded Mint.

/psychotic rant

Mint is the best choice at the moment for a normal easy to use desk top.

Ashtonford
November 4th, 2012, 05:47 PM
Its slow.. I prefer Cinnamon

Iam currently using cinnamon also ike it very much. I have tweaked 12.10 ubuntu unity and its usable but still not the best at the moment.

Eggnog
November 4th, 2012, 06:46 PM
I alternate between Unity and Cinnamon depending on my mood, relying mostly on Cinnamon lately. I am so conflicted.

Brandel Valico
November 4th, 2012, 07:20 PM
Ive tried it several times. But I always end up removing the entire unity plugin. I use Ubuntu 12.10 with the Cairo Dock desktop manager system. So far it's simply what works best for me. I view it the same way I view the OS issue. Use what works best for you as a person and let others use what works best for them.

SPK201
November 4th, 2012, 08:12 PM
I like Unity. I can work quite well with it. I'm running it on my desktop at home.

But I can't stand Unity on small monitors. It's a pain in the *** on my 15" laptop.

My preferred DE is still KDE though. Nothing else will come in contact with my laptop.

Uncle Spellbinder
November 4th, 2012, 11:27 PM
I don't mind Unity. But I still much prefer a more Gnome 2 feel. Distros like SolusOS are doing fine work an making this realistic. I like the sentiment behind MATE, but find it not very stable. Cinnamon is coming along nicely. But I really like the feel I get from SolusOS.

nothingspecial
November 4th, 2012, 11:36 PM
I love unity. I like the dash, hud and the Amazon results. That said, it just doesn't work on some of my machines (which should run it nicely). That is part of the reason why I use Lubuntu too.

Myrddin Emrys
November 4th, 2012, 11:58 PM
Is it usable? I've heard bad things about it like it's full of bugs and not nearly as stable as just regular Gnome 2 for some reason.

Don't believe the FUD - MATE has been my primary desktop for a while, and seems about as stable as Gnome 2 or any other major DE.

As for Unity, it looks nice and has some interesting ideas, it's just that there at least 4 other DEs based on different design decisions I'd rather use. Choice is good!

Max Blyss
November 5th, 2012, 03:34 PM
Unity, as I last tried it (3 mos. ago in Ubuntu 12.04) has improved by leaps and bounds in the time since it's introduction... Credit where credit is due, however, the lack of flexibility / customization really turns me off, and the Dash and Lenses, while slick and cool looking, seem to be an idea catered solely to those folks who never remember where they put their files or what icon is the appmenu (users like my grandfather, lol...).

While I'm no super - power - user or terminal guru, after years of using PC's, and two straight years of using Linux Distros exclusively, I kinda resent both the lack of control Unity allows over one's desktop layout and the odd 'my hand is being held' feeling given by the DE... It has run stably for me when I've tried it, though, and looks quite unique compared to other DE's.

I feel that Unity is a really good idea for beginners - not beginners to Linux, but beginners to computers. It would be an awesome DE for kids in school, for instance, or on a specialty version of Ubuntu. I however, remain unable to use it for more than a few days at a time without growing frustrated and bored of it.

I wonder how many versions will pass before Unity (and Gnome 3, for that matter) are done away with, and the supremacy of XFCE is recognized, lol.

Version Dependency
November 5th, 2012, 04:21 PM
Unity, as I last tried it (3 mos. ago in Ubuntu 12.04) has improved by leaps and bounds in the time since it's introduction... Credit where credit is due, however, the lack of flexibility / customization really turns me off, and the Dash and Lenses, while slick and cool looking, seem to be an idea catered solely to those folks who never remember where they put their files or what icon is the appmenu (users like my grandfather, lol...).

While I'm no super - power - user or terminal guru, after years of using PC's, and two straight years of using Linux Distros exclusively, I kinda resent both the lack of control Unity allows over one's desktop layout and the odd 'my hand is being held' feeling given by the DE... It has run stably for me when I've tried it, though, and looks quite unique compared to other DE's.

I feel that Unity is a really good idea for beginners - not beginners to Linux, but beginners to computers. It would be an awesome DE for kids in school, for instance, or on a specialty version of Ubuntu. I however, remain unable to use it for more than a few days at a time without growing frustrated and bored of it.

I wonder how many versions will pass before Unity (and Gnome 3, for that matter) are done away with, and the supremacy of XFCE is recognized, lol.

Unity may very well be a good start for beginners. But as far as power users go, if you are a big keyboard user, then Unity is a dream come true. Hit SUPER and start typing a few letters and hit ENTER...program launched...hit SUPER+1-9 to quickly launch programs on the launcher...hit ALT and start typing to use the HUD menus (great in programs with lots of menus like Gimp and LibreOffice)...hit ALT+F2 and start typing to run commands.

lykwydchykyn
November 5th, 2012, 04:54 PM
I crossed the line a few years ago from mainstream DE to massively-hacked WM-based environment, so Unity is not personally of much interest to me.

We have one computer in the house using Unity 2D, and my oldest son uses it most of the time. He seems to get around on it, and he knows he has options (other systems in the house run KDE, XFCE, etc), so I assume it works ok for him.

Every time I see Unity, it seems like something that ought to be really slick and useful for "ordinary people", and I'm glad we've got projects moving forward with new desktop models and interface ideas. I still find some of the design decisions baffling, and the lack of configurability only compounds my confusion. I hope the Unity team will keep listening to users and addressing the issues people have with the desktop.

I do confess that I covet some of the Dash and HUD features in my own environment, but otherwise I'm not tempted to switch.

Erik1984
November 5th, 2012, 05:28 PM
-cut-
I wonder how many versions will pass before Unity (and Gnome 3, for that matter) are done away with, and the supremacy of XFCE is recognized, lol.

As long as there is KDE... NEVER! *starts DE flame war* ;)

jrog
November 5th, 2012, 05:41 PM
Unity, as I last tried it (3 mos. ago in Ubuntu 12.04) has improved by leaps and bounds in the time since it's introduction...
Agree here completely, at least for computers with Intel graphics. Not so sure about the other cards -- I've heard from people having serious issues with them.


Credit where credit is due, however, the lack of flexibility / customization really turns me off . . . I kinda resent both the lack of control Unity allows over one's desktop layout and the odd 'my hand is being held' feeling given by the DE.
Just commenting here because I realized something kind of funny about myself while thinking about it. I love to customize things, almost obsessively. It used to really annoy me that Unity allowed so little customization. However, I just realized that because I am less able to customize things, I am now more productive. This might not be true about everybody, of course, but it is true about me. (Still, a desire to customize more than Unity allows is perfectly legitimate -- and I would be angry if I couldn't customize in certain places, e.g., turning off the shopping "features" in Dash.)

Copper Bezel
November 6th, 2012, 12:42 AM
Yeah, I get that, too. I've got myself lost in the customization stuff before, and I try not to change anything unless there's an immediate practical benefit, although there are still a ridiculous number of little tweaks I make for what seem to me mostly practical purposes.

For instance, I just found out how to make Caps Lock trigger the window spread in Unity, sort of as a counterpart to the Windows key for the Dash and Alt for the HUD, and I like the wm a bit more now. = ) (I just got a new desktop, and I'm using Shell there, but I've switched my old netbook to Unity, since Compiz performs better there and since it's not going to be my primary machine anymore, and I think I like having the option of messing with both. There's no question that they both have their perks.)

Max Blyss
November 6th, 2012, 03:01 AM
As long as there is KDE... NEVER! *starts DE flame war* ;)


KDE's nice, true... But it's just not the best, lol!:P

alphacrucis2
November 6th, 2012, 03:01 AM
I read on google+ that Linus Torvalds has just about given up on gnome. He was particularly annoyed that all the add ons he had that made GS usable were broken by the latest Fedora release. He is now giving KDE a serious try as his default desktop. I don't know if he has ever tried unity.

Max Blyss
November 6th, 2012, 03:04 AM
Unity may very well be a good start for beginners. But as far as power users go, if you are a big keyboard user, then Unity is a dream come true. Hit SUPER and start typing a few letters and hit ENTER...program launched...hit SUPER+1-9 to quickly launch programs on the launcher...hit ALT and start typing to use the HUD menus (great in programs with lots of menus like Gimp and LibreOffice)...hit ALT+F2 and start typing to run commands.

Keyboard shortcuts are an option in, like, every DE... And they're great if you happen to work that way... The HUD and Dash are original and interesting features, but just aren't enough to sell me on the Unity package.

divergex
November 6th, 2012, 03:19 AM
I am one of those who liked Unity from the beginning. When I had a Mac I would put the dock on the left side of the display, so Unity was a natural fit. I leave it on and showing at all times.

I don't like the way the launcher deals with too many icons, so I limit my choices to my most frequently used apps.

mamamia88
November 6th, 2012, 03:27 AM
I am one of those who liked Unity from the beginning. When I had a Mac I would put the dock on the left side of the display, so Unity was a natural fit. I leave it on and showing at all times.

I don't like the way the launcher deals with too many icons, so I limit my choices to my most frequently used apps.

how big is your screen? i use a netbook with a 15" display. When the launcher uses 10% of the screen that is a problem. Especially when it pops up when you don't want it. I wouldn't mind it nearly as much if you could only have it pop up by clicking a corner or by hitting the super key. Honestly think that gnome shell would be pretty sweet on a laptop that is only used as a laptop since the way i use my laptop has me within quick reach of the super key at all times and there is zero wasted screen space

Ichtyandr
November 6th, 2012, 06:38 PM
Unfortunately unity is not my stuff. I cannot move the launcher, it is slower and clunkier than gnome shell, I cannot make use of HUD, lens are annoying too. I never figured why Ubuntu did not just customize the gnome-shell technology.

Sometimes stories of adapting to Unity remind me the five stages of grief:
"denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance".

Linuxratty
November 6th, 2012, 07:23 PM
I did try Unity..Not for me..I hate keyboard short cuts..I like to point and click.Well,the nice thing about Linux is if something does not suite you, you can change it.:)

samalex
November 6th, 2012, 07:45 PM
I still don't like Unity or the new desktop on Ubuntu... I switched to Xubuntu when I installed 12.04 LTS in April and I don't plan on moving to anything else until the next LTS version is released or I get a new laptop, which ever comes first.

Copper Bezel
November 6th, 2012, 11:10 PM
it is slower and clunkier than gnome shell

Depends wholely on the graphics card in question. Unity is faster than Shell on my netbook (enough to make the difference between "reasonably" and "tolerably" useful.)

Awesome screen-name, by the way. = )

Hylas de Niall
November 6th, 2012, 11:40 PM
I moved on to Debian Wheezy and LMDE. For the speed and the familiarity without all the bling and commercial stuff.
I don't like adverts on TV and i don't like them in my face by default on my DE either.

nikonian
November 7th, 2012, 02:46 AM
Obviously Gnome 3 is better :)

Then again, so is Linux Mint.

sffvba[e0rt
November 7th, 2012, 02:53 AM
Obviously Gnome 3 is better :)

Then again, so is Linux Mint.

Obvious troll is obvious :rolleyes:

Unity is and has been for some time my interface of choice.


404

nikonian
November 7th, 2012, 03:08 AM
Obvious troll is obvious :rolleyes:

Unity is and has been for some time my interface of choice.


404

Uhhm, sorry? How rude. It's my opinion - I'm not "trolling". I'd give up those tired internet phrases; ineffective phrase is ineffective ;)

zombifier25
November 7th, 2012, 03:12 AM
Uhhm, sorry? How rude. It's my opinion - I'm not "trolling". I'd give up those tired internet phrases; ineffective phrase is ineffective ;)

sarcasm.

nikonian
November 7th, 2012, 03:15 AM
Oh come on guys, let's all just get on and stop being so "clever". I'm not here to argue with egos - this is a forum to learn and to help, not act a fool, right? :)

mag1strate
November 7th, 2012, 04:16 AM
I never really understood the hate for either Unity or Gnome 3. Both are really good from my time using them. I like it when people change things up, I don't want to use classic toolbar with start button forever...

Jakin
November 8th, 2012, 01:30 AM
I know this might sound abit strange, but when im using a "HUD" rather than a dropdown list of applications, i feel abit paranoid of what had been preinstalled.
Even stuff i had installed myself, then forgot about for awhile can be overwhelming. I know you can make the hud show everything, but the layout.. theres just too much going with giant icons everywhere- neat grid or not.
There are other things i don't like about lack of this and that- but my real issue is the HUD.

jerome1232
November 8th, 2012, 01:39 AM
I know this might sound abit strange, but when im using a "HUD" rather than a dropdown list of applications, i feel abit paranoid of what had been preinstalled.
Even stuff i had installed myself, then forgot about for awhile can be overwhelming. I know you can make the hud show everything, but the layout.. theres just too much going with giant icons everywhere- neat grid or not.
There are other things i don't like about lack of this and that- but my real issue is the HUD.

The HUD has hardly any icons at all, are you confusing HUD with the Dash?

Jakin
November 8th, 2012, 01:45 AM
The HUD has hardly any icons at all, are you confusing HUD with the Dash?

Whoops, Indeed the "DASH".

sfyoung
November 9th, 2012, 02:08 AM
Still hate Unity on my netbook. My ubuntu 11.04 ended it's support at the end of October so I took a deep breath and upgraded to 11.10. I know Unity has its supporters, but I don't like it. The big icons on the launcher seem dumb, designer fluff. Great for folks who are into appearances I guess, and maybe better on a large display, but it adds nothing useful to my desktop. I'll admit I'm an old guy and I just want something that works. Problem is though that I can't get gnome shell to install and can't find where gnome-session-fallback is available. How can I install gnome classic? apt-get install gnome-session-fallback sends me a message that the package might be available somewhere else but I haven't found it yet.

Copper Bezel
November 9th, 2012, 02:37 AM
Gnome Shell should install nice and easy on 11.10, and it comes with the classic session. (It's not great - but it's better in 12.04, which is the LTS, which means that if you upgrade to 12.04, you probably won't have to upgrade that machine again ever.) What error are you getting in installing Shell?

My bedraggled old netbook is running Unity now, and I kinda like it for that form factor - now that I have a desktop running Shell, I don't mind having a slightly less complete-feeling desktop on the netbook, and it runs faster and cleaner than Shell does on the awful graphics card. The icon size can be changed down to 32px, which isn't bad on a netbook screen (from the default of 64, which seems ridiculous on any screen resolution.) The setting is in CompizConfig Settings Manager, if you have it installed, under Unity > Experimental. Have you tried that?

sfyoung
November 9th, 2012, 07:53 AM
>Copper Bezel;12344781]

Thanks for the response.

>Gnome Shell should install nice and easy on 11.10, and it
>comes with the classic session. (It's not great - but it's better in 12.04, which is the
>LTS, which means that if you upgrade to 12.04, you probably won't have to
>upgrade that machine again ever.) What error are you getting in installing Shell?

It simply stalls with no error message when I try to install it from the Ubuntu Software Center.

When I try to install it from the command line I get

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package gnome-shell is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'gnome-shell' has no installation candidate

>My bedraggled old netbook is running Unity now, and I kinda like it for that form
>factor - now that I have a desktop running Shell, I don't mind having a slightly less
>complete-feeling desktop on the netbook, and it runs faster and cleaner than
>Shell does on the awful graphics card.

Okay, you like it. I'm fine with that but as I said, I don't. With the menus in the Classic Gnome, I could easily get to the functions and applications that I wanted to use. The horrible hide-and-seek icon bar in Unity is annoying and seems like it's there just to be different. I don't see any improved functionality, in fact I see a significant loss of function with the replacement of the intuitive menus by annoying giant icons. I know that my problems with it are probably operator error, but I just want to use something that works for me. Forcing Unity on users is the kind of arrogance I would expect from Apple.

>The icon size can be changed down to 32px, which isn't bad on a netbook screen
>(from the default of 64, which seems ridiculous on any screen resdolution.) The
>setting is in CompizConfig Settings Manager, if you have it installed, under
>Unity > Experimental. Have you tried that?

Haven't tried that. Can't seem to try that because I have no idea where to find Unity >Experimental. I looked for it in the Software Center but couldn't find it.

This is a horrible waste of time.

jerome1232
November 9th, 2012, 08:10 AM
First, get off 11.10, 12.04 LTS is where it's at, plus once on it you won't have to upgrade for a long time, which sounds like something you'd like. Second If you don't like Unity then don't use it, it's not being forced on you no matter how much you think it is.

That being said I have come to love the search driven HUD and Dash, to me it's much easier to type what I want and have it shown to me than having to poke through annoying menu's. I also love the global menu on my netbook, it has more real estate than any other DE I've used.

XFCE is a great DE, I think you might like it, it retains traditional menu's and has an application launcher on the bottom. It seems to be the go to gnome2 alternative and for good reason.

mips
November 9th, 2012, 01:21 PM
XFCE is a great DE, I think you might like it, it retains traditional menu's and has an application launcher on the bottom. It seems to be the go to gnome2 alternative and for good reason.

I've created a panel/launcher combo I have hidden on the right of my display and got rid of the top & bottom panels. Much more desktop space this way.

BigSilly
November 9th, 2012, 09:10 PM
Has the Unity hate cooled down? Good, if that's true. :)

I'm not running it currently myself, as I'm really enjoying Kubuntu. But I don't mind saying that I think Unity is really lovely. I have no problem using it, and find it very attractive and easy to navigate. My only issues are with performance and bugs generally (which is why I've shied away from 12.10 and stuck to KDE) but I reckon this will improve soon enough. It has to.

The missus is running 12.04 Unity on her laptop still, and it really has been a fantastic experience and a perfect fit for it. In fact she's literally just said to me "I love that Dash Home page". It's doing the right things to get that audience beyond Linux geeks. To me it knocks the socks off W8 too on a desktop or laptop (can't speak for tablets).

Linuxratty
November 9th, 2012, 09:19 PM
XFCE is a great DE, I think you might like it, it retains traditional menu's and has an application launcher on the bottom. It seems to be the go to gnome2 alternative and for good reason.

I just tried it for the first time and yes, I am very impressed! it looks like a keeper to me.:)

click4851
November 10th, 2012, 12:26 AM
don't care for it, won't use it....

sfyoung
November 10th, 2012, 03:03 AM
Thanks. I appreciate your response and the response from Copper Bezel. I guess I'll probably try to go to 12.04 or jump to one of the other distributions. My installation of 11.10 is very strange. CompizConfigurationManager will open only for about half a second and then closes before I can do anything with it so I can't easily shrink the disturbingly large icons. I guess I could figure out which file stores the icon size and try to edit it from the command line, but that sounds like a terrible option. I AM effectively forced to use Unity or the command line because for some reason I have been unable to install any of the purported alternative graphical desktops that I've tried. This upgrade has been painful. 11.04 worked beautifully for me. Thanks again for offering suggestions.

screaminj3sus
November 10th, 2012, 04:13 AM
Still hate Unity on my netbook. My ubuntu 11.04 ended it's support at the end of October so I took a deep breath and upgraded to 11.10. I know Unity has its supporters, but I don't like it. The big icons on the launcher seem dumb, designer fluff. Great for folks who are into appearances I guess, and maybe better on a large display, but it adds nothing useful to my desktop. I'll admit I'm an old guy and I just want something that works. Problem is though that I can't get gnome shell to install and can't find where gnome-session-fallback is available. How can I install gnome classic? apt-get install gnome-session-fallback sends me a message that the package might be available somewhere else but I haven't found it yet.

sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

hawthornso23
November 10th, 2012, 05:14 AM
There are bits of unity that are OK. But Unity insists on being all or nothing and I can't live with all. The lack of ability to customise things isn't a minor issue for me. I'm a bit ADHD and minor annoyances quickly drive me insane. I'm unlikely to ever try unity again.

Copper Bezel
November 10th, 2012, 06:26 AM
Yeah, I feel a lot of that, too. Weirdly wrong little details get under my skin. I don't think I could use Unity with the launcher always visible due to the weird shape that maximized windows take on when their title bars merge with a panel that's wider than they are, but with the Dodge behavior taken out, it's very strange to have to flick the side of the screen (or the corner, as I have it set now) to bring up the launcher on an empty desktop, too. This interface would make me very nervy on a full desktop. It's a wonderful set of features that could really mesh into a perfect desktop experience, but I feel like there's a hidden settings page that someone's been fiddling with that I can't access and that the sane defaults are just hiding somewhere.

But at the same time, I'm really enjoying Unity for a basically-a-Chromebook netbook. Did you know that if you use a clipboard manager (or at least Glippy, which is the one I use) you can search it from the HUD? Recent Chrome history, too. Crazy.

Edit: I'm also finding I use it vaguely like Shell, anyway - I found the default window switching so awkward (unless I've simply missed how I'm meant to navigate windows) and bound Caps Lock (which is inactive) to the window spread, which also raises the launcher, so I get my overview, and I can close windows with middle-click. So I don't actually raise the launcher from the screen edge, anyway.

deadflowr
November 10th, 2012, 06:29 AM
There are bits of unity that are OK. But Unity insists on being all or nothing and I can't live with all. The lack of ability to customise things isn't a minor issue for me. I'm a bit ADHD and minor annoyances quickly drive me insane. I'm unlikely to ever try unity again.

Your OCD, people with ADHD wouldn't even finish reading this sentence.

vasa1
November 10th, 2012, 06:54 AM
Your OCD, people with ADHD wouldn't even finish reading this sentence.
Which is more fashionable to be?

BTW, what does "WM" in the title mean?

sffvba[e0rt
November 10th, 2012, 06:56 AM
Which is more fashionable to be?

BTW, what does "WM" in the title mean?

Window Manager.


404

deadflowr
November 10th, 2012, 07:20 AM
Which is more fashionable to be?

BTW, what does "WM" in the title mean?

Their both horrible mental conditions to have.

But ADHD is slightly less irritating.

Obsessing about things to the point of anguish probably puts undue amounts of stress on a person, most likely shortening their life.

People with ADHD just move on to the next subject.

As a note: I purposely used the wrong version of your, as it would annoy someone with OCD proving them as such. It should be you're.

vasa1
November 10th, 2012, 07:39 AM
Their both horrible mental conditions to have.

But ADHD is slightly less irritating.

Obsessing about things to the point of anguish probably puts undue amounts of stress on a person, most likely shortening their life.

People with ADHD just move on to the next subject.

As a note: I purposely used the wrong version of your, as it would annoy someone with OCD proving them as such. It should be you're.

And the first their should be they're.
The second their would be cheered by the gender-neutral brigade.
Now you know my condition! ;)

neu5eeCh
November 10th, 2012, 04:30 PM
I've created a panel/launcher combo I have hidden on the right of my display and got rid of the top & bottom panels. Much more desktop space this way.

Interesting. As regards XFCE, I've essentially done the same thing. I get better screen space with XFCE than with Unity when using a browser like Firefox. When using Libre Office, space usage is the same as Unity except the menu doesn't vanish.

deadflowr
November 10th, 2012, 06:55 PM
And the first their should be they're.
The second their would be cheered by the gender-neutral brigade.
Now you know my condition! ;)

Yes, and as you can tell, I'm lazy and highly possessive.:)

As for Unity, it's just a desktop, nothing more, nothing less.
I have no love or hate for it.
I use it but can live without it.
Computers in general don't make me over-emotional, and most likely won't until one either locks me out of my spaceship or time-travels to the past to kill my mother.

jerome1232
November 10th, 2012, 08:36 PM
Interesting. As regards XFCE, I've essentially done the same thing. I get better screen space with XFCE than with Unity when using a browser like Firefox. When using Libre Office, space usage is the same as Unity except the menu doesn't vanish.

Not to diminish xfce, it's great, but it can't possibly use less screen real estate than Unity is in my posted picture. There is zero wasted space while retaining a panel.

Copper Bezel
November 10th, 2012, 09:08 PM
Not that it matters, but with a hidden panel with the menu applet on and cramped or removed decs, you could remove one more line. It wouldn't be very useful for most users, so I don't think it's about wasting space, exactly, but you could technically use slightly less.

Unity is about as cramped - erm, space thrifty - as I would want a WM to be, personally. = )

rai4shu2
November 10th, 2012, 09:45 PM
It's nice that the flame wars have died down, but that just demands that we look at the real problem here:

What drives the design?

With Gnome Shell, I feel like the design was driven by a need to eliminate distractions. Unfortunately, I don't really believe this need exists outside the mind of Gnome developers, and thus the resistance to Gnome Shell in the community.

With Unity, I think the design was driven by a desire to emulate the touch-style paradigm of application-centric thinking. I don't think touch input devices have proven themselves, outside of their convenience in extremely mobile devices. For the desktop, it really doesn't make any sense to use this design until we perfect an input technology like eye-tracking.

Copper Bezel
November 10th, 2012, 11:20 PM
It's not that simple for either of them, though. I don't think there's a unified, single goal for either project, and I don't actually think there should be. I mean, dogged pursuit of any one absolute rule that's somehow supposed to apply in all cases would probably lead to a lot of oversights. And a Linux desktop just doesn't have the freedom to maneuver that Windows or Mac does; there's not enough of a top-down structure in the design process to have that kind of unified vision, and Gnome or Ubuntu can't force app developers to follow their standards, either.

Shell and Unity are both window managers made by a committee of people saying, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if...?"

I think that you're right that Shell seems designed around visual simplicity - I mean, that's at least one of the major goals they're keeping in mind. I don't see a touch paradigm in Unity, though. The launcher and dash have large buttons for sloppy clicking, and the keyboard is more emphasized as a way of getting around and doing things than in just about any desktop that isn't Ratpoison, so those are generalizations we could make about the interaction mode. Obviously, Unity also emphasizes searching whenever possible, too. With the searchiness, large buttons, and keyboard focus, it's sort of like Chrome's UI concept, but without the simplicity (without meaning either of those generalizations as an evaluative comment.)

VooDooSyxx
November 11th, 2012, 04:45 PM
I for one, am loving Unity. I've used xmonad the past 2+ years and what sold me on Unity is the keyboard navigation. It really is excellent. The dash and HUD are pretty sweet as well. I see the dash and HUD as basically a super-powered dmenu, which works out great for me since I said goodbye to those stupid application menus a long time ago.

More than the Unity hate, what I don't really get is the keyboard hate. I see a lot of comments here and on other sites with things like "(insert function here) is now 4 mouse clicks away instead of 2. This is unacceptable!" I just want to scream into my monitor USE THE KEYBOARD. There are two interfaces. One has 100+ buttons and the other has generally 3. It's pretty obvious which is the more powerful interface.

sfyoung
November 11th, 2012, 06:06 PM
Thanks. sudo apt-get install gnome-panel did the trick.

monkeybrain2012
November 11th, 2012, 06:19 PM
I like it, just wish that it is less buggy. There are a whole bunch of things broken in 12.04 and many are fixed in 12.10, I am waiting for an update.Instead of adding more stuffs and keep changing it IMO they should spend the time to make it solid and bug free.

MisterGaribaldi
November 11th, 2012, 06:52 PM
@OP: Oh, I don't think anything has really cooled down regarding Unity. No, I don't think it's cooled down at all.

In the course of the next several months to a year, when I'm finally in a position to do so, I will going to a System76 laptop, and probably one of the first things I will do is put KDE on it so as to completely avoid anything having to do with Gnome and Unity.

addegsson
November 11th, 2012, 07:02 PM
Unity is my favourite DE. :)

Sableyes
November 11th, 2012, 07:10 PM
I dont think the Unity hate has gone away either. Its just more accepted and less people yell about it now. But its still hated ^^

As for me, always have thought it was the bees knees :) Love it!

LillyDragon
November 11th, 2012, 08:13 PM
@OP: Oh, I don't think anything has really cooled down regarding Unity. No, I don't think it's cooled down at all.

In the course of the next several months to a year, when I'm finally in a position to do so, I will going to a System76 laptop, and probably one of the first things I will do is put KDE on it so as to completely avoid anything having to do with Gnome and Unity.

I'm sure there's still a vocal minority, from the looks of it. =P Unity is far from a traditional desktop environment, so the split in the userbase was bound to happen, IMO. Stats for KDE and XFCE usage went up drastically with Unity's introduction, so it's safe to say we're apart of that statistic. XD That's the great thing about Linux, having choices, so that's a huge plus for other Window Managers. I think now that everyone's made their choices of which WM to stick with, there isn't as much noise about Unity as there was before.

At this point it only annoys me that I have to install a different Window manager out-of-the-box, instead of just tweaking it to my preferences like with previous Ubuntu releases, so it adds another step to the installation process to me. I'm loving XFCE and can't wait to figure out what's snagging up on MATE (The user-settings-daemon is unresponsive, for whatever reason.) so I could try that out too.

llanitedave
November 11th, 2012, 08:55 PM
I don't hate Unity, I actually think it's pretty cool for the most part. Better for small screens than large ones, though.

Screen real estate doesn't seem to be an issue with any of them, since both Xfce and KDE allow you to hide the panels when you aren't hovering over them.

I settled on KDE not because because Unity is that bad, but because KDE is that good.

layers
November 11th, 2012, 10:06 PM
unity is the reason I will probably never veer off from 10.04

screaminj3sus
November 12th, 2012, 12:28 AM
It's nice that the flame wars have died down, but that just demands that we look at the real problem here:

What drives the design?

With Gnome Shell, I feel like the design was driven by a need to eliminate distractions. Unfortunately, I don't really believe this need exists outside the mind of Gnome developers, and thus the resistance to Gnome Shell in the community.

With Unity, I think the design was driven by a desire to emulate the touch-style paradigm of application-centric thinking. I don't think touch input devices have proven themselves, outside of their convenience in extremely mobile devices. For the desktop, it really doesn't make any sense to use this design until we perfect an input technology like eye-tracking.
Unity works excellently as a desktop UI IMO, particularly on a laptop. Its great at conserving vertical screen space, while not hiding too much functionality, and its got very good keyboard navigation.

I like gnome-shell too, but not as much. I don't like that in gnome-shell the dock is only available in the overlay, so you have to open the overlay way too often. I like that unity has a feature rich launcher that is always visible.

screaminj3sus
November 12th, 2012, 12:31 AM
I like it, just wish that it is less buggy. There are a whole bunch of things broken in 12.04 and many are fixed in 12.10, I am waiting for an update.Instead of adding more stuffs and keep changing it IMO they should spend the time to make it solid and bug free.

I do agree that bugginess has been unity's biggest issue. 12.10 has been quite solid for me so far though, I'm not getting any more random compiz crashes like I had in 12.04 and 11.10.

x-shaney-x
November 12th, 2012, 12:31 AM
Unity works excellently as a desktop UI IMO, particularly on a laptop. Its great at conserving vertical screen space, while not hiding too much functionality, and its got very good keyboard navigation.

I like gnome-shell too, but not as much. I don't like that in gnome-shell the dock is only available in the overlay, so you have to open the overlay way too often. I like that unity has a feature rich launcher that is always visible.

It does have an extension called "dash to dock" which works very well and even "dodges" like the launcher used to.

Copper Bezel
November 12th, 2012, 12:45 AM
It's a nice extension for mimicking the Unity workflow. It also adds reasonable window cycling so that the Dash can be used not only for launching, but also for window switching, too, as in Unity.

It's down to workflow, though. I don't personally find myself using the Favorites Bar as often as I use other features in the Overview. I use the Overview to switch apps or workspaces, close windows, and launch applications by search, and within that is a little bar to launch my pinned apps, too. So having the "launcher" available without going to the overview doesn't offer much, because I'm still going there for everything else.

In Unity, search, the launcher, the workspace switcher, and window switching are all sort of a-la-carte. In Shell, they're all in one place. It's possible to hack either one to work more like the other, and as I've said, I make my Unity work more like Shell than it's really intended to. It can be done going either way.

But it's probably best to pick the workflow that works for you and not have to fight the system, as screaminj3sus has with Unity.

screaminj3sus
November 12th, 2012, 01:31 AM
It's a nice extension for mimicking the Unity workflow. It also adds reasonable window cycling so that the Dash can be used not only for launching, but also for window switching, too, as in Unity.

It's down to workflow, though. I don't personally find myself using the Favorites Bar as often as I use other features in the Overview. I use the Overview to switch apps or workspaces, close windows, and launch applications by search, and within that is a little bar to launch my pinned apps, too. So having the "launcher" available without going to the overview doesn't offer much, because I'm still going there for everything else.

In Unity, search, the launcher, the workspace switcher, and window switching are all sort of a-la-carte. In Shell, they're all in one place. It's possible to hack either one to work more like the other, and as I've said, I make my Unity work more like Shell than it's really intended to. It can be done going either way.

But it's probably best to pick the workflow that works for you and not have to fight the system, as screaminj3sus has with Unity.

Exactly, I had tried the dash to dock extension, which made it better for me, but I still found that I liked unity better, and that I was basically just trying to make gnome-shell act more like unity.

When it comes down to it, one's favorite UI is the one that doesn't require you to "fight the system", whichever that UI may be.


It does have an extension called "dash to dock" which works very well and even "dodges" like the launcher used to.

I was angry when they first removed dodge windows from unity, but over time I actually started to prefer having the launcher always visible.

monkeybrain2012
November 12th, 2012, 02:55 AM
I was angry when they first removed dodge windows from unity, but over time I actually started to prefer having the launcher always visible.

If you are using 12.04 you can get dodged windows back with ppa.

http://www.webupd8.org/2012/05/how-to-get-dodge-windows-and-minimize.html

It is not a deal breaker for me, but I prefer having this function.

rai4shu2
November 12th, 2012, 07:23 AM
Unity works excellently as a desktop UI IMO, particularly on a laptop. Its great at conserving vertical screen space, while not hiding too much functionality, and its got very good keyboard navigation.

There's a lot to like about Unity, in particular because it aims to combine all the best of both worlds (hence the name). The thing I'm pointing out here is simply this:

Application-centric design

I'm sitting here wondering if this is really a good idea. I mean, we've had a very document-centric design for a long time for a lot of good reasons.

MisterGaribaldi
November 12th, 2012, 04:41 PM
There's a lot to like about Unity, in particular because it aims to combine all the best of both worlds (hence the name). The thing I'm pointing out here is simply this:

Application-centric design

I'm sitting here wondering if this is really a good idea. I mean, we've had a very document-centric design for a long time for a lot of good reasons.

Well, Mac OS and Mac OS X are, respectively, exclusively and mostly, application-centric OS platforms, and have been quite successful as such. And, while it's true there are times when being able to start up multiple, isolated instances of an application can be beneficial, I'm not sure I see this as being a requirement for most people.

MS-DOS was, arguably, docu-centric, though there were plenty of programs you would open and stay in, across the creation and access of multiple documents. Windows has been, as far back as my memory goes, largely -- if not exclusively -- docu-centric.

So, classically, Apple's Mac platform and Microsoft's DOS and WIndows platforms have fairly well represented both operational paradigms.

Arguably, Linux has always tended towards the docu-centric approach, so far as I'm aware of it. And, to me in a way, it's quite ironic because Gnome represented, classically, the ultimate mix of Mac OS / Mac OS X-like "Finder" yet with the best of the docu-centric approach that Windows has always been known for. That's a good part of the reason I've always preferred Gnome, and it's probably one of the biggest reasons why I'm still upset over the Gnome 3/Unity change.

MisterGaribaldi
November 14th, 2012, 05:19 AM
Just for laughs, I did some digging and found out how to install Ubuntu to a flash drive, which I've now done with Kubuntu.

I cannot believe how fast KDE runs on my i7 MBP. It's always been a slow-ish DE on the other systems I've used it on, which arguably have been WAAAAAAAY behind the i7. But now that I have tried this out, I admit I'm thoroughly impressed.

Not that I'm trying to wish my life away, but I kind of wish it was several months from now already so I was done with everything else and ready to sell the MBP and buy a laptop with Linux.

friTTe81
November 16th, 2012, 03:06 PM
Im starting to like the little sucker =D

Jakin
November 16th, 2012, 10:21 PM
If you are using 12.04 you can get dodged windows back with ppa.

http://www.webupd8.org/2012/05/how-to-get-dodge-windows-and-minimize.html

It is not a deal breaker for me, but I prefer having this function.

That's something that annoyed me when i tried Unity on 12.10, why oh why, isn't the click to minimize like a real taskbar, directly implemented? (by not needing a patch to do it). On 12.10 yet, there isn't a patch.

It's not hate for the DE, one day i may be drawn more to it, than say, KDE; but its more- awkward for me to use it (Unity).

Aaron Christianson
November 17th, 2012, 06:50 AM
I have liked unity from the start, but I find it's much easier to get work done with a tiling window manager these days. Unity is my favorite non-tiling environment, however. I'll take it over lxde, xfce, kde, gnome-shell or openbox any day of the week. I has the best keyboard access of any of them.

I just wish there was a way to have the dash and the hud with a tiling window manager. Then, my life would be perfect.

VooDooSyxx
November 17th, 2012, 03:05 PM
I have liked unity from the start, but I find it's much easier to get work done with a tiling window manager these days. Unity is my favorite non-tiling environment, however. I'll take it over lxde, xfce, kde, gnome-shell or openbox any day of the week. I has the best keyboard access of any of them.

I just wish there was a way to have the dash and the hud with a tiling window manager. Then, my life would be perfect.

I have to agree. The keyboard control in Unity is first class. I switched over from a tiler, xmonad, after roughly two years of using it. Unity does some simple tiling, at least with two windows (Ctl+Super+Right or Left) and between that and the multiple workspace support it works for me.

anarchticgrimm
November 17th, 2012, 03:45 PM
Unity is getting more mature every day. But the compiz.. eh.. not going anywhere. - I mean, I was always using KDE because of it's understanding of flexibility. While I can always make my own KDE based minimalistic look. But I'm not a supporter of "minimalism must be simple as hell" I believe that a clean look can be fully customizable. At least there should be more options for people like me. Until then, I'm going to stick with KDE.

Yet, this doesn't mean that Unity is a bad DE. Quite the opposite, It's getting better every release. The only thing I hate about it is Compiz.

PJs Ronin
November 18th, 2012, 03:48 AM
Well, now I am getting really confused. After reading some more positive aspects in this thread I decided to give Unity one more chance. I soon ran into problems as I switched between Unity and Gnome for two reasons... first, I haven't got a clue what I'm doing and second, the logon screen is a little ambiguous as to the differences between gnome, gnome classic, et al.

Anyway, what I've ended up with is some sort of a hybrid where I have:
~ a unity launcher complete with Dash,
~ a top global panel that now (I could never get the top panel in gnome to do this) has transparency all the way across,
~ a bottom panel that shows what's running, and my 4 cube desktops,
~ and when I try and see exactly what DE is running I get:
myid@myid-OEM:~$ echo $DESKTOP_SESSION
gnome-classic
This is exactly what I want but I'm not sure if I should be thankful or suspicious of impending doom when it all goes south and unity or gnome want to be top dog.

rai4shu2
November 18th, 2012, 07:53 AM
I'm curious whether all the keyboard junkies have tried out ratpoison (http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/). If all you care about is the keyboard, then that's really the best DE. I use Xfce because it fits best with my mouse-centric habits of any DE I've tried yet.

VooDooSyxx
November 18th, 2012, 03:29 PM
I'm curious whether all the keyboard junkies have tried out ratpoison (http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/). If all you care about is the keyboard, then that's really the best DE. I use Xfce because it fits best with my mouse-centric habits of any DE I've tried yet.

Glad Xfce is working out for you. As for ratpoison, I have tried it and used it for a couple months on two different occasions. It's a window manager, and a pretty good one, but it's not a desktop environment. Also, while it handles tiling beautifully, it doesn't respond too well with apps that are hostile to tiling and it's multiple workspace implementation is an added on hack that is less than stellar.

Version Dependency
November 18th, 2012, 03:37 PM
I'm curious whether all the keyboard junkies have tried out ratpoison (http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/). If all you care about is the keyboard, then that's really the best DE. I use Xfce because it fits best with my mouse-centric habits of any DE I've tried yet.


Haven't tried ratpoision but I have given xmonad and awesomewm a go. I quite liked both of them.

MisterGaribaldi
November 18th, 2012, 04:03 PM
Looks like my posts, and some of the others here, have basically demonstrated the first part of this thread's title is false. :D

I'm willing to bet good money that the "hate" going on over Unity and Gnome Shell (which look the same to me) has less to do with the UI itself, and far more with this attitude on the part of both Gnome and Canonical that "this is just the way it is", and to heck with what the users themselves actually want.

And no, misters and misses UF mods and admins, I'm not willing to just simply "drop it". That's the whole point! You can't just go around saying "quit hating on Unity" and then saying "See? Everyone seems to have settled in nicely." because that doesn't reflect reality, and I seriously doubt it ever will.

I never, ever in my life thought I would become a KDE user. But what choice do I realistically have here?

sdowney717
November 18th, 2012, 04:43 PM
Then install Cinammon desktop!
http://askubuntu.com/questions/94201/how-do-i-install-the-cinnamon-desktop

I put it on my system for my wife to use for her user name.

mlentink
November 18th, 2012, 04:59 PM
And no, misters and misses UF mods and admins, I'm not willing to just simply "drop it". That's the whole point! You can't just go around saying "quit hating on Unity" and then saying "See? Everyone seems to have settled in nicely." because that doesn't reflect reality, and I seriously doubt it ever will.

I never, ever in my life thought I would become a KDE user. But what choice do I realistically have here?

So what happened, did Mark personally come over and twisted your arm and tortured you to use Unity? Go on and rant as much as you like, but the fact remains that Canonical stuck their necks out.

Obviously you don't like it. Others do. So use something you do like. It's a free world.

MisterGaribaldi
November 18th, 2012, 11:05 PM
You know, you people just keep missing the point, and I really don't know why, but I'm pretty tired of arguing with people who insist on being deliberately dense.

sdowney717
November 18th, 2012, 11:14 PM
You know, you people just keep missing the point, and I really don't know why, but I'm pretty tired of arguing with people who insist on being deliberately dense.

You also say this

But what choice do I realistically have here?

Cinnamon Desktop is a good gnome2 like choice, what is wrong with this?

xedi
November 18th, 2012, 11:29 PM
I'm willing to bet good money that the "hate" going on over Unity and Gnome Shell (which look the same to me) has less to do with the UI itself, and far more with this attitude on the part of both Gnome and Canonical that "this is just the way it is", and to heck with what the users themselves actually want.


A problem I see is that users don't inherently know what users want. It's obvious that unity is controversial but I have yet to see some reliable data or survey that would give us an overview what ubuntu users or users in general prefer. All I know is that Canonical is testing what works best with different people and according to their methods they determined that unity is the best option they can currently give. They apparently don't listen to you but it's a big leap to they don't listen to users.

VooDooSyxx
November 18th, 2012, 11:31 PM
Looks like my posts, and some of the others here, have basically demonstrated the first part of this thread's title is false. :D

I'm willing to bet good money that the "hate" going on over Unity and Gnome Shell (which look the same to me) has less to do with the UI itself, and far more with this attitude on the part of both Gnome and Canonical that "this is just the way it is", and to heck with what the users themselves actually want.

And no, misters and misses UF mods and admins, I'm not willing to just simply "drop it". That's the whole point! You can't just go around saying "quit hating on Unity" and then saying "See? Everyone seems to have settled in nicely." because that doesn't reflect reality, and I seriously doubt it ever will.

I never, ever in my life thought I would become a KDE user. But what choice do I realistically have here?

Entitled much? Let me guess. You haven't supplied even one line of code for either Gnome or Unity, and you certainly aren't paying for either of them, yet like so many others you honestly think the developers should code to your standards and their own direction be damned. Sorry bro. The world don't work like that.

While you're at it, I suggest you go over to Kubuntu and rail on them for forcing you to use KDE, and make sure and hit the MINT guys up since they're forcing Cinnamon and MATE down your throat. Oh right. Nobody is forcing anything on you or anyone for that matter. You just want to complain about a desktop you're not even using. Carry on then

Aaron Christianson
November 19th, 2012, 03:04 AM
I'm curious whether all the keyboard junkies have tried out ratpoison (http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/). If all you care about is the keyboard, then that's really the best DE. I use Xfce because it fits best with my mouse-centric habits of any DE I've tried yet.
Almost any tiling window manager is fully keyboard-accessible. Some floating window managers (the kind everyone uses) are as well, like EvilWm or Calm. Compiz can actually bind all window management functions to the keyboard as well, though it isn't exactly optimized for the task.

Between HerbrstluftWM, Vim, and Pentadactyl, I don't have to use the mouse for anything except advanced image editing (for simple stuff, I just use imagemagick). Sometimes I do end up using for web browsing. Old habits.


I never, ever in my life thought I would become a KDE user. But what choice do I realistically have here?
Off the top of my head: xfce, lxde, mate, e17, cinnamon, openbox, CDE, evilwm, compiz, metacity, Xmonad, dwm, spectrwm, awesome, fluxbox, framebuffer+tmux, musca, herbsluftwm, twm, ttwm, monsterwm, stumpwm, ratpoison, i3, wmii... There are more, but that's what comes to mind.

It might be easier to answer the question, "what choice don't I have?"
In any case, these links will provide an answer that, while not complete, is at least more comprehensive than mine.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_Environment#List_of_desktop_environments
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Window_Manager#List_of_window_managers

SantaFe
November 19th, 2012, 03:23 AM
Actually, I neither Hate nor Love Unity. I figure if I leave it alone, it'll leave me alone. :)

Hence my Posting Tag. :lol:

rai4shu2
November 19th, 2012, 08:30 AM
Actually, if Ubuntu had gone primarily with Unity 2D rather than 3D, I think that would have worked out best. Getting away from Gnome and GTK completely might have made for a good change, but this is all just speculative, now.

SeanIM
November 19th, 2012, 09:01 PM
Honestly I don't mind it but...I do miss the older simpler feel. All change requires a little bit of getting used to I guess.

Definitely curious about this buzz on the Cinamon desktop though...I might have to check that out.

chili555
November 19th, 2012, 09:20 PM
I feel the same way I do about it that I do about Windows vs. Linux, my mountain bike vs. my road bike or my convertible vs. my sedan. They are all tools for jobs. If it doesn't work for me, I change. In the case of Unity, it's just too easy to install Gnome shell or download xubuntu or lubuntu. In my opinion, it isn't worth any hate; it is only worth a trial and then a decision to keep it or change it.

On various computers here, I have and use both Unity and Gnome.

orb9220
November 20th, 2012, 09:56 AM
+1 chili555 like mentioned the tools required to get the job done.

Was Ubuntu back mid 2006 for about a year or a tad more. But back then couldn't find the tools for high end Image & Video editing. So was forced back to Windows and doing the Win7 thing and got curious again about Ubuntu.

Tried the 12.10 and just hated the whole Unity thing. For me it isn't my kind of tool simple as that. For other's a great tool to get the job done. And happy they are loving it for them.

No hate here just ubuntu took a direction that isn't for me. And moved on.

Started looking and fell in love with Mint 14 "Nadia" cinnamon. And was the right tool for me. And still can keep connected with the great Ubuntu people as we are the same family. And now with RawTherapee and darktable makes for some interesting testing for my photography works and maybe finally be adopted by a Linux family forever :-)

Some of us still like twinkies!...Some of us prefer Ding-Dongs!
.

t0p
November 20th, 2012, 11:42 AM
I got a new laptop a while ago and installed Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity. It looks tidy enough, I like the dash... but it seems to be slowing down. When I first got the laptop and put Ubuntu on it, the thing flew,esp in comparison to my previous box. But now it's starting to hang when I start a new app, open a new window etc. I dunno if it's down to Ubuntu attracting cruft or what. But there it is.

billio
November 20th, 2012, 12:39 PM
I have had Unity on a laptop since it appeared. It was acceptable on the laptop from day one and has only improved since then.

I also loaded it on my desktop after it's initial release but I had so many problems with it I had to move to Mint. However from the 12.10 release it now works fine - Compiz and other things crash every now and again but that is not a problem. Some of the difficulties were probably due to the Nvidia drivers.

I can see a few tweaks that would be useful :

1. It would be useful if a keypress could show the names of all the applications currently in the Launcher. I know you can move the mouse over each icon to see the names individually, but if it's possible to numerate the icons it surely must be possible to show all the application names at the same time.

2. The Dash Scope icons do not not have an associated text description, therefore I have no idea what some of them do. There needs to be some way of labelling them and better still, providing help text. I also think it would be better to have these icons at the top of the Dash display rather than at the bottom so they are more prominent.

3. I use the classic menu indicator to access software, especially applications I don't use very often. It's more convenient to look in an ordered list than remembering an application name. It would be much better if this application were a fixed item in the Launcher, just below the Dash.

4. In fact I think there is a general requirement for a "list browsing", "menu & sub-menu" type application for which the user can switch contexts.

5. Oh, and what happened to Wobbly Windows in 12.10 ?. I know it seems daft but an animated movement of windows is much more pleasant on the eye.

So, generally I find Unity is pretty good and effective.

zneastman
November 21st, 2012, 12:43 AM
I've gone back and forth on this. When I first tried 12.04, I didn't think Unity was ready for prime time -- and that's without having used any earlier version, since I stick with LTS releases. It was just too buggy.

But the improvement from 12.04 to 12.04.1 was pretty remarkable, and it's now what I use day to day (replacing Debian Stable/Gnome 2). I think that progress is even more remarkable when compared to Gnome Shell's, which is stable but a complete visual mess -- some applications have menubars (e.g. Evolution) and some have menu buttons (e.g. Nautilus, Epiphany/Web), some applications fullscreen on maximize (e.g. Epiphany) and some don't (e.g. Evolution) and actual Gnome-Shell elements look and behave differently from everything else, and occasionally add a second and different menu interface to applications (e.g. Web).

That's another way of saying that even though every GTK-dependent desktop is in transition right now, Unity does a nice job of making that look tidy; the Launcher/HUD/Dash do their own thing the same way Gnome-Shell does, but at least your application menus always work the same way.

Second, Unity is the best keyboard-centric interface I've used -- and that's one of the things that gets me confused when people talk about it (and Gnome Shell, for that matter) as an "imitation" tablet interface. Apart from everything that happens in the Dash, HUD exposes every menu item in every application to the keyboard. That's not exactly new, but it's finally done well -- that is, not through idiosyncratic shortcuts.

What really interests me, though, is what'll happen with all of Unity's underlying technologies and libraries. For instance, Unity's the only modern DE using Compiz (except maybe MATE) and I wonder how long that's sustainable.

rai4shu2
November 21st, 2012, 07:25 AM
Actually, Zorin (http://www.zorin-os.com/) comes with Compiz (and its own window manager on top of that). Then there's Pantheon in Elementary (http://www.elementaryos.org), which is built on Clutter and GTK 3. There's frankly way too many things coming out, lately.

I'm personally looking forward to the E17 release, and whatever improvements Razor-Qt has in store in the next six months.

mamamia88
November 21st, 2012, 07:52 AM
It looks so pretty and I want to like it I just can't get used to it. I use xfce and edit the menu to only include stuff i actually use and have synapse installed for quick launching stuff. Don't see the point having a giant dock pop up at unexpected intervals and waste screen space for not much benefit.

Hylas de Niall
November 21st, 2012, 07:18 PM
Unity (IMO I should stress) looks great, but is too heavy for my tastes and my current hardware(!) - i've already mentioned the 'feature' that turned me off it.
....So i thought i'd go for Xubuntu, but then i thought 'why not just use Ubu's Daddy?' so i installed Debian Wheezy/xfce, and quite frankly i haven't looked back. It's great, light, and above all stable (and Ad-free).

LillyDragon
December 2nd, 2012, 05:00 AM
Bumping this topic to say that I'm really eating my own words against Unity right now. I've been booted into it for the past two days and loving it!

http://i1058.photobucket.com/albums/t410/johnluke728/th_UbuntuDesktop5.jpg (http://i1058.photobucket.com/albums/t410/johnluke728/UbuntuDesktop5.jpg)

As it turns out, thanks to MyUnity, Gnome-Tweak, and Compiz Config, Unity is just as tweakable as I like, outside the panels. (Which I always left the arrangement of alone in Gnome 2 anyway, so the top panel's fine as-is for me.) Heck, I even got back the transparent windows shortcut I loved so much on Gnome 2 thanks to messing with the Opacity settings on Compiz! (If only the wobbly windows wouldn't lag on my hardware, I loved that feature too.) I rambled on about it here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=12383754&postcount=29) as to what I did to make Unity feel 100% usable with my mouse.

Granted, I'm still more comfortable playing certain games in XFCE, because it's a much lighter DE, so it doesn't freak out when going into fullscreen like Unity does. Otherwise for normal daily desktop usage and GIMP, I'm perfectly happy with Unity, shockingly. I would even say it's the kind of polished and alien desktop experience I was looking for all this time! It looks so nice just sitting there on a blank desktop even! Call me a fan, I've gone to the Dark Side now, haters. :P

grashdur
December 7th, 2012, 08:50 PM
Perhaps there's something wrong with me because I liked the Unity interface almost right away. I still like it, except for the bugs or problems in it (which I hope are fixed in newer versions): The inconsistency from one day to the next of how to move between different files in the same program, and the difficulties of accessing an application window that's open but that has become hidden (not available with ALT-Tab).

Trammer
December 7th, 2012, 11:31 PM
My "hate" has cooled down because I stopped using vanilla Ubuntu after Unity. I've been using Mint and Xubuntu ever since.

I think I would probably like Unity if using it on a tablet, but on a desktop I want all the freedom and customisation I had with Gnome 2.

Copper Bezel
December 8th, 2012, 02:10 AM
I've officially switched. I like Shell - I really do. But it's just not the complete package that Unity is, not remotely as efficient in action, and not as prompt at getting bugs fixed (which is saying something). And there's not a single change in 3.6 I like.

I'll miss useful workspaces, but I'm getting to feel that Unity will have functioning workspaces before Gnome sorts their panel hiding with full screen windows. And certainly before they figure out what they're doing with the notification area. (In retrospect, the fact that they actually managed to make notifications more inconsistent than in Gnome 2 should have been a signal.)

Welly Wu
December 8th, 2012, 05:00 AM
I used to dislike the Ubuntu Unity desktop environment with a passion, but then I decided to purchase Microsoft Windows 8 Pro 64 bit Upgrade for $39.99 USD.

I have had a change of my old habits.

I like the new Ubuntu Unity desktop environment quite a bit. It's my most strongly preferred desktop environment for any GNU/Linux distribution and I am glad that Canonical has shipped it with Ubuntu. It's clean, elegant, modern, and simple. It's packed with features galore and I can add more features to it quite easily. I just added a bunch of Ubuntu Unity Dash lenses to expand my search capabilities. I also added Ubuntu Tweak to customize the Ubuntu Unity desktop environment to meet my exact needs. Now, everything looks beautiful and it's very unique. That's one of the distinguishing features about Ubuntu Unity: it's very unique. I like it a lot now. It's stable, fast, and features rich.

I also like Microsoft Windows 8 Pro 64 bit quite a bit and I am looking forward to Microsoft Windows Blue sometime in the second quarter of 2013. It's modern, cool, and features rich too. It's fast as lightning too.

Out with the old and in with the new for me. I am a modern PC user now.

Bazon
December 9th, 2012, 01:04 PM
Unity is still bad:

No workspace separation on the launcher
No way to minimize windows with single click on launcher
getting more and more commercial

x-shaney-x
December 9th, 2012, 01:26 PM
Unity is still bad:

No workspace separation on the launcher
No way to minimize windows with single click on launcher
getting more and more commercial


I read somewhere that workspace separation is being addressed with the next release, an indication on the launcher indicator?
As there are minimize buttons on the individual windows, minimize via the launcher icon is duplicating a function.
I think minimizing via the launcher is just a habit of people because it is what they are used to, not necessarily needed. But then I have always minimized via window buttons so it's not a habit I needed to break.
And will continue to get more and more commercial. Partially for the users benefit but make no doubts about it, ubuntu is very much part of a larger business plan.

Jakin
December 9th, 2012, 02:22 PM
As there are minimize buttons on the individual windows, minimize via the launcher icon is duplicating a function.
I think minimizing via the launcher is just a habit of people because it is what they are used to, not necessarily needed. But then I have always minimized via window buttons so it's not a habit I needed to break.


Ah, but as the idea of Unity based on speed and function, its much faster and just plain smarter to allow clicking on launcher to minimize an app. It is Afterall a taskbar- not just a launcher.

Paddy Landau
December 9th, 2012, 02:40 PM
I loved Unity right from the start.

Unity is so quick compared to the old menu-driven interface that I don't miss the old style at all (and the menu is still there in the Dash for the few occasions that you might need it).

I'm not one of those that likes to customise endlessly. If the interface works well, just a few colour tweaks are all I need.

It is only the odd bug in 12.04 that I find frustrating, but that's nothing whatsoever to do with the design of the interface.

Copper Bezel
December 9th, 2012, 05:24 PM
Bazon, the minimize-from-taskbar bit has been beat to death. Personally, in addition to the simple objection that it's counter-intuitive and a Windows legacy feature, I'm one of the people who find it far too easy to trigger by accident, which is very irritating, so I'm fairly entrenched on this, too. But it's also totally inconsequential; it's minimizing, after all - not a feature that actually does anything and certainly not, IMO, worth sacrificing consistency for.

Unity's workspace switching makes little sense. I really don't know what it's for. It's slightly better than Compiz by itself, though, especially now that one click selects the workspace. The taskbar button is nonsense, and I wish it could be disabled - I just ignore it and use a hotcorner.

Commercial is good. I like that it's an OS someone feels is worth maintaining.

itpro007ca
December 9th, 2012, 06:03 PM
At first I wasn't crazy about it,but now I like it.I tried a few other WMs,but kept coming back,so I'll stick with Unity.

It's fast,efficient and cool and it's different.I love how with Dash I can see what programs I have installed,find one and start it.I can pin programs to the Launcher and the list goes on!

click4851
December 9th, 2012, 08:31 PM
"cooled down"?, if the OP means changes distro or DE than yeah I guess it has cooled down. My feeling for the default DE haven't changed.

LillyDragon
December 10th, 2012, 02:41 AM
My feeling for the default DE haven't changed.

And it doesn't have to, that's the best part about Linux is how spoiled for choice we are, unlike with Windows. =P At least the Unity buzz encouraged a lot of users to try other alternatives, which has given even the once obscure XFCE DE a huge limelight to shine in.


I like the new Ubuntu Unity desktop environment quite a bit. It's my most strongly preferred desktop environment for any GNU/Linux distribution and I am glad that Canonical has shipped it with Ubuntu. It's clean, elegant, modern, and simple. It's packed with features galore and I can add more features to it quite easily. I just added a bunch of Ubuntu Unity Dash lenses to expand my search capabilities. I also added Ubuntu Tweak to customize the Ubuntu Unity desktop environment to meet my exact needs. Now, everything looks beautiful and it's very unique. That's one of the distinguishing features about Ubuntu Unity: it's very unique. I like it a lot now. It's stable, fast, and features rich.

Well said there, I have the same feeling myself. After giving Unity a serious try for about an hour, playing around with it and tweaking it with other tools, I got pretty attached to it for a lot of the reasons you mentioned. Clean, elegent, and fast. My feelings towards Windows 8 is a different story, but I'm liking the approach Unity takes towards the modern desktop. It's different for sure, but not as bad as I thought at first.

Copper Bezel
December 10th, 2012, 03:00 AM
Unity is really fairly conservative. It's not altogether that different from OSX or Windows 7 in operation. It's certainly closer to them than it is to Windows 8, with Gnome Shell floating in the middle distance somewhere. I don't think of it as trying very hard to be a "modern" desktop, but then, that's not necessarily a good or bad quality by itself.

fastguy
December 10th, 2012, 06:04 PM
But the worst thing right now is the top panel. I just don't understand the point of having a top panel forced on the screen which seemingly serves no purpose whatsoever other than to host your notification bar and that wretched global menu. It's such a huge design flaw for a desktop environment. You basically have two static elements on your screen at all times instead of just simply one.

I wish they would just remove the top panel completely and morph the notifications into the Launcher panel instead.

I agree with the above comment.
- The top bar is my only main issue with Unity. I just don't need it and I don't understand why that space is occupied just for a few icons. Those icons can move to the Unity bar and the top panel can dissaper.
- I have a 22" screen. I don't use the global menu as I don't like to move the mouse all the way up to reach a menu. For maximized windows, anyway it does not bring any benefit.

I need the following in Unity, hoping one day I can have it:). Note that this is the setup I have in Windows 7.
- I have dual monitors, the bigger one sitting on top of the notebook's smaller screen. I have same monitor setup both at work & home, so I nearly always use a monitor in this configuration. Email & Browser stays on top monitor, while chat windows, calendar reminders of Thunderbird & pidgin list stays on the bottom laptop monitor.
- I need the Unity launcher on the bottom of top monitor, just because the right hand side can be mixed with Back button on Firefox, Chrome, etc. Having a menu there tires your hand to control the mouse. I don't need auto-hide neither, as I have plenty of screen space and I like the Unity bars functions like showing me the count of mails in Thunderbird.
- If the Unity bar is at the bottom, it shall not prevent me from moving windows from top monitor to bottom monitor.
- Gnome-shell actually blocks the windows from moving from monitor to monitor if you manage to place the panel on bottom with the reflection extension
- Cinnamon did not let me place the panel on the upper monitor's bottom edge. It either goes all the way to the bottom of lower notebook screen or the top of the upper monitor.

Hope I can get these one day and it will be perfect fit for my needs. I'm attaching my current desktop setup.

DeadSuperHero
December 10th, 2012, 08:29 PM
I actually really like the direction that Unity has taken. I wouldn't have said the same thing 2-3 years ago, but it's gotten so much better.

NightsShadeQueen
December 11th, 2012, 04:59 AM
I actually quite liked Unity the first time I encountered it (with 11.04, I think). There are few minor - minor! - things I'd love to change, but they're on the order of "the icons are still too big at size 32" and "Can I please move the unity bar to the *right* side? Please?"

The fact that it's so easy to keyboard-shortcut most things is kind of awesome. I love the idea of searching for applications instead of trying to remember where you stashed something. I liked the workspace grid (I had a different background for each workspace because otherwise I'd forget which one I was on :D)

That said, I've recently switched to Cinnamon (mostly because 12.10's launcher bar refused to play nice with me - it doesn't come out reliably even at the highest sensitivity) - and Cinnamon's also pretty awesome. Not sure which one I like better.

llanitedave
December 11th, 2012, 07:10 AM
The global menu seems to work best on a small screen. On a larger monitor with multiple windows open I prefer window-based menus. If Unity gives that choice then I'm happy with it.

My other big beef about the Unity interface was the small distance between the close box on the left-hand screen buttons and the trigger for the launcher panel. I was always launching something when I just wanted to close a window.

If Unity can give me a stable and installable DE for 13.04 (12.10 was a disaster on my machine) I'll be willing to give it another shot. Until then, I'm happy with the right-hand window buttons and the bottom panels on my KDE and Xfce varients.

Copper Bezel
December 11th, 2012, 07:53 AM
I need the following in Unity, hoping one day I can have it:). Note that this is the setup I have in Windows 7.
- I have dual monitors, the bigger one sitting on top of the notebook's smaller screen. I have same monitor setup both at work & home, so I nearly always use a monitor in this configuration. Email & Browser stays on top monitor, while chat windows, calendar reminders of Thunderbird & pidgin list stays on the bottom laptop monitor.
- I need the Unity launcher on the bottom of top monitor, just because the right hand side can be mixed with Back button on Firefox, Chrome, etc. Having a menu there tires your hand to control the mouse. I don't need auto-hide neither, as I have plenty of screen space and I like the Unity bars functions like showing me the count of mails in Thunderbird.
- If the Unity bar is at the bottom, it shall not prevent me from moving windows from top monitor to bottom monitor.
Well, that, yes, or you could move the external to the right of the primary like a normal person. = )

fastguy
December 11th, 2012, 08:19 AM
Well, that, yes, or you could move the external to the right of the primary like a normal person. = )

:) I think this is more ergonomic. Otherwise I will need to also carry a keyboard with me to place in the middle of both monitors (remember, one is a notebook screen), or, have to turn my head pretty right or left while typing on the keyboard. In my top-bottom setup, it's much better for ergonomics and usability. Try it :)

sffvba[e0rt
December 11th, 2012, 08:29 AM
I like a review like this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzFm2tmmhGc&feature=share&list=UU2hubjuU7U4zIc_UpG-hFqA - someone who uses computers as a means to an end, who isn't that much into tech but not a complete idiot when it comes to PC's.

Someone that sees something new and goes, "Oh, this is nice, I like this... I am going to embrace it and use it to make my life easier..."

edit: oh, as an aside, I just noticed in the video that pressing the home button again minimizes the dash, so it is inconsistent with all other icons for launching and minimizing :p



404

gozzerd
December 11th, 2012, 10:28 AM
I had heard bad things about it from others, so was a little dubious. I installed 12.04 on a secondary partition just to try it, thinking that I would make Cinnamon Mint my main OS. But when I used it I was shocked at how good it is. There was only a small learning curve, and I was quickly more productive than ever before. I use a grid of 9 desktops, 3x3, and the way the switcher works is better for the things I have to do than any other system I have used. It is nearly as convenient as having 9 monitors. I loved the E16 pager, but this is better.

I like Dash better than menus now. For me it's faster. I don't use HUD much. The apps I use aren't very HUD friendly. But mousing up to the top bar is not a big deal. I don't need to use those menus very often anyway. The toolbars in the apps cover most things.

There's still room for improvement, but I have a great deal of confidence that things are going to improve even more. I think Mark and the developers did really well with this. This is my full time work environment now, and I am pretty happy with it.

oldrocker99
December 11th, 2012, 06:56 PM
I have used quite a few DEs, but MATE is the desktop I keep coming back to. It's not as buggy as the rep would have it, I can put quicklaunch buttons on the top panel, and it works better on my obsolete Acer 5516 laptop than the other DEs I have put on it, including KDE 4.9, and I *like* KDE 4.9.

ade234uk
December 11th, 2012, 07:01 PM
I honestly hated it to begin with. Installed 12.10 and now I am enjoying Ubuntu again and looking forward to the next release. It's a polished desktop.

I get the odd niggle, to be expected, but it's definitely a great improvement over 12.04.

rrnbtter
December 11th, 2012, 09:00 PM
Greetings,
The reason HUD isn't used much is because it is still in its infancy. Dash is quickly becoming what it is intended to be. Wait until you see the improvements in 13.04 even in its early development. Got to say I have the Raring Ringtail on two laptops and I am totally amazed. I have been involved in computers since MSDOS 2.something and I have never had anything as nice as 13.04. Things are getting exciting around here. Can't wait until the next evolution! Unity all the way from start to finish for me!
rrnbtter

Noo 2 Ubuntoo
May 28th, 2013, 09:21 PM
Greetings,
The reason HUD isn't used much is because it is still in its infancy. Dash is quickly becoming what it is intended to be. Wait until you see the improvements in 13.04 even in its early development. Got to say I have the Raring Ringtail on two laptops and I am totally amazed. I have been involved in computers since MSDOS 2.something and I have never had anything as nice as 13.04. Things are getting exciting around here. Can't wait until the next evolution! Unity all the way from start to finish for me!
rrnbtter

"Upgraded" from Lucid (Gnome 2 desktop) to Precise a few eeks ago. Fed up with using the kryboard so much to navigate a highly unintuitive and user hostile Unity. It took me back to the days when I used Word Perfect - everything done on the keyboard and it was so SLLLOOOWWW, just like Unity!

Dash is a riot - displays all manner of apps I don't want. The docker thing - ever noticed how if you have a few files open (As I do) you can't see them and can't remember which ones you've got running so click on the relevant app launcher in the dock and it displays the last open file you used for that app - only it's not the one you want so you waste time clicking the app in the docker again only tyo be confronted by all the files you've got running under that app plastered all over the screen so small that you can;t recognise them and there's no title text to tell you the name of each file so you waste more time opening each one until you find the one you wanted? Nice - NOT!!

As foe HUD all mine ever said was that it was broken. Anyway, why would I want a floating bar to use the functions I use the most when editing a file when the same functions appear atthe top of my file I am editing?!!!

Downloaded GHnome shell extensions, went back tro Gnome 2 appearance - bliss now I can find any running file I want in 1 click. I can open any file on teh computer in 4 clicks.

Unity sucks - a pretty looking piece of low function eye candy for mobile devices for superficial light use. If your'e a productive user download teh Gnome shell extension or try Linux Mint with the Mate desktop and then yiou can start getting things done again instead of wastinmg time typing away and clicking away trawling through loads of useless apps before you find what you want!

Linuxratty
May 28th, 2013, 09:58 PM
I have classic Gnome on this box and Unity on the other..I hate it less than I did. I do like just typing in what I want. I miss Close Window in the Ubuntu version of Fire Fox.
Still,if Classic Gnome had a search window,for me it would be perfect..

Sam Mills
May 29th, 2013, 04:40 AM
I like unity, but prefer xfce or lxde. DE's don't matter a whole lot to me, as I only tend to do one thing at a time on my computer anyway. For a hard core multi-tasker it may be different, but as long as things are running smoothly I'm happy. It's not really that hard to get used to new de's once you spend some time with them.

But I never understood the "hate" when something new comes out. With windows/mac it may be different, but in linux, we have so many choices, that there is something out there for everyone. If you can't get along with something, it's easy to change and use what works for you. Constructive criticism is OK, but there's no need to bash things.

Sam Mills
May 29th, 2013, 04:51 AM
Unity sucks - a pretty looking piece of low function eye candy for mobile devices for superficial light use.
Once those words come out, as far as I'm concerned, you lose all credibility. Saying you find it not to your liking is one thing, but outright bashing of OS's and software is not allowed here. It makes one come across as immature, and not ready to handle a real discussion.

No one expects you to love everything, but it could be handled in a better manner.

HermanAB
May 29th, 2013, 05:10 AM
Unfortunately, Gnome/Unity is still ridiculously slow. KDE is better on so many levels and I actually like my desktop cube and wobbly windows.

fontis
May 29th, 2013, 05:29 AM
Well, my initial reaction to Unity has remained the same.
Unity itself however is way less buggy today than it was back when it got forced onto everyone.
I still think its' buggy, and horrible to use in a few ways. But then again, the fact that its LESS bad now, than it was ages ago makes it durable at least.

Truth be told, I don't even know what to do :P
I run Unity, KDE and ElementaryOS on different boxes, and they all have their "fun parts", but neither seems to have that extra bit which would make me want to stick with it forever.

monkeybrain2012
May 29th, 2013, 05:48 AM
Unfortunately, Gnome/Unity is still ridiculously slow. KDE is better on so many levels and I actually like my desktop cube and wobbly windows.

?? I have used all three of them (on same machine, different partitions) , KDE is the slowest on all account and kwin cpu usage is high. Yes, kde would be faster if you disable all effects but then why not just run LXDE? Unity in 13.04 is very fast, but can be made even faster and smoother with the compiz-experimental ppa (though one should get that sweet spot and stop upgrading as there are some risks)

Moose
May 29th, 2013, 05:51 AM
To be honest, the only Desktop Environment I believe actually goes well with Linux, is Gnome 3.8.
Unity was alright for a while, but in my honest opinion, it's just a slower, clunkier version of Mac OS X.
Every other desktop environment is either a Mac OS X or Windows clone. Gnome is the only Desktop Environment that is actually unique and suits Linux.

monkeybrain2012
May 29th, 2013, 06:09 AM
To be honest, the only Desktop Environment I believe actually goes well with Linux, is Gnome 3.8.
Unity was alright for a while, but in my honest opinion, it's just a slower, clunkier version of Mac OS X.
Every other desktop environment is either a Mac OS X or Windows clone. Gnome is the only Desktop Environment that is actually unique and suits Linux.

Gnome 3.8 is not bad, I have it on Debian, except I don't think all the pieces fit together, may be because of Debian's packaging (gnome3.8 is from experimental) Nautilus is still a mess, all x + - buttons are gone (I enable them in other applications with gnome-tweak tools but doesn't work for Nautilus) and it always opens in full screen, changed that with the dconf-editors but the settings got forgotten as soon as I close and reopen nautilus. Dash (whatever it is called) has no category and everything get dumped in one place, partially fix it by re-introducing categories in gconf-editor or dconf-editor but now additional boxes appear for groups so the same app appears twice, once inside a category box, once outside ungrouped. I can do whatever I do in gnome-shell with Unity, the most convenient feature of the shell is the hot corner on the top left, but that can be done in Unity with the Compiz scale addon.

HermanAB
May 29th, 2013, 06:10 AM
"just a slower, clunkier version of Mac OS X"
Yup, I know what you mean, since I actually use a Mac. The Mac desktop is sometimes annoying, whereas Gnome/Unity is annoying all time.

On my Mac, I actually find myself inside a Linux XFCE Virtual Machine most of the time. I use the Mac apps for some fun things, and Linux for the important things.

I should just re-install the Mac with Linux, but it is just not quite annoying enough to make it worth the effort.

Sam Mills
May 29th, 2013, 06:22 AM
Unfortunately, Gnome/Unity is still ridiculously slow. KDE is better on so many levels and I actually like my desktop cube and wobbly windows.

If bling is your thing, then go for it. That's what linux is all about. Make it your own. :)

Sam Mills
May 29th, 2013, 06:25 AM
To be honest, the only Desktop Environment I believe actually goes well with Linux, is Gnome 3.8.

Wow. (there's nothing to say)

Moose
May 29th, 2013, 07:04 AM
Wow. (there's nothing to say)

I was waiting for someone to say something like that. People like you are so annoying, using very vague answers such as this just to make it look like you know what you are talking about.

Paddy Landau
May 29th, 2013, 12:08 PM
If your'e a productive user download teh Gnome shell extension or try Linux Mint with the Mate desktop…
Honestly, most of what you wrote is a personal opinion, not a statement of fact. I find Unity far more productive and faster to use than the old menu-driven method. But that's my opinion, and you're welcome to disagree.

Perhaps you just haven't learned how to use the Unity method? But you don't need to. Just use a different distribution. If you want to stick with Canonical, use Kubuntu, Xubuntu or Lubuntu. Otherwise use one of the many, many other distributions out there.


Unity itself however is way less buggy today than it was back when it got forced onto everyone.
Forced? No one ever forced anyone onto Unity. This is Linux. I have been forced onto Windows, though, every time I've worked for a company that used Windows. :)

montag dp
May 29th, 2013, 02:25 PM
Gnome 3.8 is not bad, I have it on Debian, except I don't think all the pieces fit together, may be because of Debian's packaging (gnome3.8 is from experimental) Nautilus is still a mess, all x + - buttons are gone (I enable them in other applications with gnome-tweak tools but doesn't work for Nautilus) and it always opens in full screen, changed that with the dconf-editors but the settings got forgotten as soon as I close and reopen nautilus. Dash (whatever it is called) has no category and everything get dumped in one place, partially fix it by re-introducing categories in gconf-editor or dconf-editor but now additional boxes appear for groups so the same app appears twice, once inside a category box, once outside ungrouped. I can do whatever I do in gnome-shell with Unity, the most convenient feature of the shell is the hot corner on the top left, but that can be done in Unity with the Compiz scale addon.That's strange, I don't have to go through any of those hoops with Gnome 3.8 on Ubuntu. Like you, I don't like how the new "appfolders" work in the show applications window, but I trust that will be refined in future releases. Gnome Shell is my favorite of the Linux DEs I've tried (includes Unity, KDE, Cinnamon, and XFCE), but they all have a lot to like and at least some things to dislike.

LillyDragon
May 29th, 2013, 08:31 PM
Once those words come out, as far as I'm concerned, you lose all credibility. Saying you find it not to your liking is one thing, but outright bashing of OS's and software is not allowed here. It makes one come across as immature, and not ready to handle a real discussion.

No one expects you to love everything, but it could be handled in a better manner.

Exactly. Words like "LOLOLOL THIS SUCKS" can't be taken seriously in a conversation. All I heard was ranting, and from the sound of it, he barely took the time to figure out how Unity works. (Something I'm glad I did, Unity is actually pretty fluid at what it does; I'd prefer some mouse gestures for changing desktops, but switching between keyboard and mouse isn't exactly hard for me. Of course, that's my opinion too.) The quote below is a much better example of an opinion.


To be honest, the only Desktop Environment I believe actually goes well with Linux, is Gnome 3.8.
Unity was alright for a while, but in my honest opinion, it's just a slower, clunkier version of Mac OS X.
Every other desktop environment is either a Mac OS X or Windows clone. Gnome is the only Desktop Environment that is actually unique and suits Linux.

To a point, I have to agree, but Unity's slowly starting to carve out its own distinct feel, I think. Although the top taskbar does come off as MAC-inspired from the get-go. At least it still retains the virtual desktops of Linux, and does its own thing with the side bar. Otherwise, I find it a refreshing alternative to the usual document-centric DE, and since I don't have a MAC, it's the perfect go-to DE for me when I need a more alien desktop. =P

Also, how's Gnome 3.8 shaping up? Last I tried it during 3.2, I wouldn't call it messy, it was just hard for me to see the vision the Gnome devs were going for. If it's gotten better with time, I might consider installing it again once I have a new desktop machine.

mips
May 29th, 2013, 09:49 PM
The whole Unity vs xxx, vs yyy etc is beginning to sound a lot like religion...

r_avital
August 15th, 2013, 09:26 PM
Forced? No one ever forced anyone onto Unity. This is Linux. I have been forced onto Windows, though, every time I've worked for a company that used Windows. :)

Well, that's not a statement of fact either; nobody forced you to work for them.

r_avital
August 15th, 2013, 09:44 PM
So is the trend here to dismiss all valid crlitcism of Unity as "religion" or "you haven't yet learned how to use it" and such?

Different people have their different preferences for how they work, different people are more or less productive in different ways. Individual, subjective opinion is just that.

The main issue with Unity, is the business decision to push (not "force," push) this DE as the default one, for the sake of something that Canonical admits, from the beginning, won't attract a lot of users. If it had been done for something that would benefit a large population of users, that would be one thing. You could then discuss the pros/cons and ROI.

But from the get-go, Canonical admitted that this DE was created for the sake of users who will use a single Desktop Environment for mobile devices (like the Ubuntu Edge) and PCs. And if you read Canonical's own literature on it, by its own admission, they are not expecting massive adoption of the concept, or of the hardware. In fact, "admission" is the wrong word, they're actually proud of appealing to some limited "elite" or something.

And for that, they started a Holy War. That's the problem with Unity.

As to the rest, I'm quite amused with suggestions like "hide the launcher" and "make the top panel transparent" so you can have a "fully photographic wallpaper" etc.

Yeah? Really? When I hide the launcher, it may un-hide when I need it, or it may not. Yes, I know, push against the left edge, don't "slam" the mouse into it, and yes, I've seen the Unity-tweak-tool and CCSM plugin, and yes, I've set the slider to the maximum sensitivity, then the minimum, then the maxiumu again, no difference, the launcher may or may not un-hide, it does whatever the dickens it wants, no matter what rain-dance I do.

And the top panel? Same tools allow me to set the transparency - again, no reaction, it's always opaque, bright or dark - and as far as the notification area, it is a documented bug in Launchpad that it does not respect the panel's transparency settings.

So please, I'm absolutely thrilled if those workarounds work well for the people who suggest them, and even more so if they solve problems for others, but these are not reasons to dismiss valid criticisms, because on this end it's a respectable, powerful i7-950 processor on a fairly modern ASUS MB with a respectable nVidia GT-640 and stable drivers, and none of that cr@p works correctly. And all for the sake of 31 future Ubuntu-Edge users. Hurray for them.

l3dx
August 15th, 2013, 09:54 PM
The whole Unity vs xxx, vs yyy etc is beginning to sound a lot like religion...

Welcome to the internet :P

oldrocker99
August 16th, 2013, 12:03 AM
Welcome to the internet :P

Ho, ho. I alternate between XFCE and LXDE on my laptop, and stick to strictly MATE on my desktop. MATE gives me that good old Hardy Heron feeling.

I do think that Unity is a terrific desktop, but I just don't like it. If, on the other hand, I had it on a tablet or smartphone, I'd love it. It's way better than the current GNOME, and it still beats the holy crap out of Windows 8, but, for that matter, so did XP.

craig10x
August 16th, 2013, 02:46 AM
Also, many forget that the default gnome3 desktop is gnome shell...i have used both gnome shell and unity and i think unity is much nicer to use, more streamlined, and just seems to flow a lot better....I think they took the right direction developing their own version of gnome shell...

Also, i think a lot of it comes down to whether you mind using a dock or not...if you don't mind you might be more inclined to like unity....if you insist on the old fashion windows style way, you probably won't be happy with it...I like docks, so i get along fine with unity and it's my favorite desktop environment now... :D

Paddy Landau
August 16th, 2013, 01:59 PM
Well, that's not a statement of fact either; nobody forced you to work for them.
Well, technically, that's true; but I live in the real world where I cannot dictate what companies use, and I have to work for someone who needs my skill set. I have also worked for a company that didn't use Windows, and later changed over — I was not going to resign over that! Besides, I don't have the skills to live self-sustainably on a remote island. If you work for a company that insists on Unity, you will be "forced" to use Unity or find a new job, not always easy to do especially if you like your current job.

But if you are in control of your own PC, you can run whatever you like, and Unity is just one (free) choice out of many.

ukripper
August 16th, 2013, 05:10 PM
Never had any problem with Unity since 12.04 onwards (I have started using since then)

Eddie Wilson
August 16th, 2013, 07:58 PM
I've always liked Unity. You can open up or find anything with one or two clicks. It's very easy to learn and that is the main thing people have problems with. They don't take the time to learn something before they make a judgement. It's sad that some will not even try anything different or new. Well as far as I'm concerned, I look at it as their lost. Remember, this is just my opinion and as such has no value what so ever. :D

Erik1984
August 16th, 2013, 08:50 PM
Although I am not using Unity right now (in a KDE phase) I really like how it has progressed and looks so slick now. Maybe not my personal favourite DE but by far the best Out Of the Box experience.

Paulgirardin
August 16th, 2013, 09:26 PM
I loved Unity from the beginning.
Now,whenever I have to use a menu navigated DE,like XFCE,that I had to install on some low end hardware,I hate to have to search for apps with the mouse.

Paulgirardin
August 16th, 2013, 09:45 PM
The most annoying feature concerning Unity (and one that could be easily remedied) is choosing apps in the lens. Why oh, why oh, why (when I type in Terminal for example) do I then have to navigate to the Terminal Icon!?! This feature is so obtuse and annoyingly easy to remedy that it alone turns me off Unity. Gnome Shell's Activities overview is far superior in this respect. Like Synapse, I can type Terminal and hit return. Done. Unity should anticipate the software that I want, like Synapse or Gnome Shell, and hightlight it. C'mon boys.



My Unity (13.04) does not behave this way.
I type ter in the Dash and hit enter and the terminal opens.At worst I have to use the arrow keys to navigate to another suggestion the dash offers.

One catch that might be causing you problems with the dash,is that ,if the cursor is in the dash area the option under the cursor will automatically highlight when the dash opens.Hitting enter will open that option and not the first option your search brings up at the top left of the dash list.

Paulgirardin
August 16th, 2013, 09:59 PM
I have unity enabled.. Instead I mostly use compiz effects, cairodock, and the hud--I find that I almost never click on the unity sidebar...the only reason I still have it is because it includes the hud, which I can't get enough of.

I agree.I remove all the apps from the launcher,except for a couple (Shutter and Nautilus) that have useful quicklists.

Paulgirardin
August 16th, 2013, 10:04 PM
When I first heard about Unity I was very excited, but the initial implementation in 11.04 left me going back to 10.10. But by 11.10 I came to like it, and in 12.10 it rocks.

The only thing I'd like to see now is a flyout menu for the desktop switcher icon so I can go directly to a specific desktop in one move rather than the two-click move I do now.

Other than that, I'm pretty happy with Unity these days. I've even gotten over my fear of the concealed menus. :)

Try setting a hot corner to show workspaces.Unity Tweak will allow you to do this.Much more convenient than the workspace launcher.

Roasted
August 17th, 2013, 12:46 AM
I've gone full circle with Unity and then some. I hated it, loved it, and now I'm kind of in the middle. I like using the dash as a launcher, but it's not exactly as quick as I would like it, even with high end hardware. Every time I fire up a new install I cringe when I have to disable 'certain' lenses. Things like that should be in a separate lens altogether... not the primary lens integrated with your local files. The left bar is quite decent to use and I have no issues with it. HUD is nice, but not exactly a must-have for me. The only time I ever used it was in Gimp, but even in Gimp sometimes I'm not sure what I'm looking for and I'll spend more time blind-firing in the HUD to pick up the option I want.

The thing I dislike about Unity is the unforeseen future. Each time Gnome comes out with a new update, it makes sense, I get it, and I enjoy it. It's simple, incredibly fast, and very integrated with many services. Unity's lens-based approach in upcoming releases is an element of concern as I really can't express how little I care about something like that. The other thing is the fact that Unity is pretty much Ubuntu only, so when I go to other distros, I have no familiar interface. Other environments are available, even the Mint-brewed Cinnamon, so I can at least get a familiar UI despite whatever distro I fire up.

All in all, I don't despise Unity, but it's quite a few pegs beneath a handful of other environments that I prefer.

PJs Ronin
August 17th, 2013, 02:20 AM
Yeah, include me in the group that went apoplectic when the launcher/dash/Unity first appeared.... they just didn't suit me at all. I hasten to add that at that time the vast majority of my computer work centered on the mouse, and here was Dash making me lean forward from my comfy chair and make physical contact with the keyboard. I was not happy, and said so.

In that unhappy state of mind I went looking at Gnome, Gnome Shell, whatever other gnome nomenclature the Gnome team came up with, Mint, Cinnamon, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Xfce and a partridge in a pear tree. Some of those had some drop dead spiffy features, but other aspects left me cold. Not one made me a happy camper, except Unity. Unity, atm, gives me the best "user experience" (jeez I hate that phrase), but I wish Unity had some of the Gnome aspects, and Xfce, and...

JRV
August 17th, 2013, 01:57 PM
I use ClassicMenu Indicator, and/or drawers, so I have a menu driven system.
This way I can avoid using the dash and it's search driven system.

I like the launcher bar on the left side of the screen, and I absolutly love the quicklists.

neimac
August 17th, 2013, 03:25 PM
I prefere XFCE but I would say Unity is a strong second for me, followed by KDE and then Gnome 3.

stinkeye
August 17th, 2013, 04:07 PM
It's getting to a point where I have to remove/disable and configure to much after a fresh install of unity.
Just installed Linux Lite (https://www.linuxliteos.com/) to another drive.
Uses the xfce desktop and the speed difference is quite noticeable.

Paddy Landau
August 17th, 2013, 04:47 PM
It's getting to a point where I have to remove/disable and configure to much after a fresh install of unity.
Yes, Ubuntu and Unity are aimed at the "average" or "typical" user who doesn't want to tailor much apart from some eye candy. In other words, the user who wants things to "just work". I'm one of those people, which is why I appreciate Ubuntu.

If you want to tailor your system to a large degree, you indeed need a different distribution. For example, my son prefers Arch.

d-cosner
August 17th, 2013, 06:48 PM
I like Unity because Ubuntu decided to take their own direction by developing it. The developers chose a unique color scheme too and I really like how the system looks by default. Ubuntu used to be considered ugly but now it looks very professional and attractive. I use the launcher, all the apps I use on a daily basis are in the launcher and it is handy. The dash looks cool and it serves it's purpose the same as the old style menu did.

I can see where Unity can work across varoius devices and honestly the interface is not perfect but it is stll better than any other solution currently available in my opinion. Each new version of Unity seems more refined and better in some way to the prevoius version. Even small details like default icons are getting attention and this is very encouraging. The only thing that I do not care for in Unity is that you can not minimize an application from the launcher icon, that's it. I got around that by having the "Show Desktop" icon in the launcher, not a perfect solution but it's alright.

Unity works very well for me on my laptop and it makes good use of the available screen realesate and I appreciate that. The whole thing for me is that I like distributions that think for themselves, it's nice seeing some original and new ideas being used and developed. Ubuntu tales a lot of heat for doing things their own way but I prefer their approach. Most distributions I use these days are the ones that are doing their own thing because I like originallity and fresh ideas.

With Linux there is no one size fits all and Ubuntu and other distros are giving us more choice and new ways of doing things. Unity has gotten a lot of attention from game developers and hadrware vendors so things are going in the right direction and everyone benifits as a result. I find that a lot of people that have never used Linux before really enjoy how moch it is like the MacOS. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on a laptop for a neighbor because she could not connect to her router reliably with Windows. When I gave the woman her laptop back she was thrilled with Unity and she took to it almost instantly. My daughter used a MacBook all threw colledge. My daughter used my computer to do her homework on one day because she was watching my younger boys while I was in the hospitat. The first thing my daughter said to me when I came home was how much she liked using my computer with 12.04 and Unity!

My daughter has seen just about every different desktop environment at one time or another but that was the first time she had ever really liked what I had loaded. My daughter loved the global menus, the default look and just the way things worked in general. My dad also liked the interface so much that he installed 12.04 on one of his laptops. My dad is a die hard Windows user yet he was very impressed with Unity and that says a lot to me.

There is plenty of choices out there for people that do not like Unity but I believe that many do not give Unity a fair chance. Lets face facts, the desktop is changing and moiving away from the traditionl layout. Sure, there are some distros like Mint that are developing Cinnamon but even Cinnamon is advancing and changing the way you use your computer. Change is good and developers are really coming up with some interesting things these days that make using Linux more fun and exciting. Instead of people complaining about Unity they should be happy that someone is trying to develop something fresh for the masses.

Roasted
August 18th, 2013, 12:46 AM
Yes, Ubuntu and Unity are aimed at the "average" or "typical" user who doesn't want to tailor much apart from some eye candy. In other words, the user who wants things to "just work". I'm one of those people, which is why I appreciate Ubuntu.

If you want to tailor your system to a large degree, you indeed need a different distribution. For example, my son prefers Arch.

Even that stance can be wildly subjective. I'll throw out a counter argument to represent the opposing side of this fence. When I fire up Ubuntu, I don't like having to disable the shopping lens. I also don't like having to install the tweak tool and adjusting the blur/background color of the dash to get it to respond in an acceptable time frame, even with a desktop sporting a decent processor and GPU. On the other hand, I can install Gnome and it's beautiful and pretty much awesome out of the box. That said, I still like using the *buntu base, as being able to easily install non-free codecs and drivers is a breeze with *buntu, which is why I use Ubuntu Gnome.

At the end of the day, using what you prefer is the only correct answer. But in an effort to agree with you but in a slightly different sense, you have my comment above.

:guitar:

Keith_Beef
August 28th, 2013, 10:26 AM
I'm having a few puzzling moments. This is my second day of Unity, after upgrading from 11.04 to 12.04.


It took me a while to realize that Firefox's menu had been moved out of its window and up to the top of the screen, into the panel. It makes it look like SWMBO's mac.
I'm using a 32" TV screen as my display, but I'm sitting a good two metres away from it. I managed to increase the size of the launcher icons and the system font, but not the desktop icons or text.
CTRL and + make Firefox zoom the web page, but not the text size in pop-up boxes, like where I'm typing this list item.
I need to add more keyboard layouts; I have
US international with dead keys,
Serbian Cyrillic,
Greek,
Armenian,
and I want to add some more (I think I can do this in gnomeconf-editor) and switch to compose key usage so that I can type Polish and the Scandinavian languages (dead keys won't do l with kresecka and having to press right-ALT and l to get ř is not intuitive).
Still linked to the keybpard, I find menus and helps poppong up when I type, because I'm hitting some meta or super key.

Welly Wu
August 28th, 2013, 05:11 PM
I re-installed Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS 64 bit on my System76 Lemur Ultra Thin (lemu4) PC and I think that this is the most stable version of Ubuntu Unity yet. I tried Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04 64 bit, but I did not really like the fact that the online accounts integration was buggy and the Ubuntu Unity desktop web apps integration was a hit or miss affair. Those two issues gave me the most number of problems. The other thing that I didn't like about Ubuntu Unity in the more recent Ubuntu release versions is that random software applications kept crashing repeatedly with no solution in sight.

I think that Ubuntu Unity is a bold vision from Canonical and I think that it bodes well for the future of the GNU/Linux desktop. It's not perfect, but nothing ever is. I don't mind the fact that it is not highly customizable without adding Ubuntu Tweak or Unity Tweak or PPAs to mend it to your specific needs, but I realize that this is the sticking point for many Ubuntu users that have switched to another GNU/Linux distribution or another desktop environment. I have learned the hard way that over-customizing Linux can lead to a wide array of issues not which to mention stability and I tend to go easy on hardcore customizations and tweaks.

I'm looking forward to Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64 bit in late August 2014. I'll wait until the dust settles before I upgrade to the next LTS release version.

I think that each standard release version introduces some new features for Ubuntu Unity, but I don't find them to be compelling enough to keep upgrading every six months in April and October each year. There really is not any particular killer app or feature in these standard release versions for Ubuntu Unity that I find to be worth the teething issues. Desktop web apps, online accounts integration, Ubuntu One app indicator, Bluetooth app indicator, Smart Scopes, etc. don't appeal to me as I really don't use those features enough to justify constant upgrade cycles. I'd rather wait two years for major LTS upgrades with a raft of new features that are well tested and debugged for extra stability.

I tend to purchase new PCs every two years in any case. I think that I'll get a newer System76 notebook PC in August 2014 with Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64 bit pre-installed.

Ubuntu Unity is the most usable desktop environment that I have tried in comparison to Apple Macintosh OS X Mountain Lion and Microsoft Windows 7 and 8 64 bit. GNOME 3, XFCE 4, LXDE, Cinnamon, MATE, K Desktop Environment are nice to install and use from time to time, but they don't have the simplicity and usability of the Ubuntu Unity desktop environment. Ubuntu's Unity is a decent compromise between cutting edge features while retaining the core features of a modern desktop user interface. It's not my first choice, but it is the one that I use most of the time when I use GNU/Linux.

rai_shu2
August 29th, 2013, 11:45 AM
Looking forward to 14.04, actually. Unity w/o Compiz might actually win me over (if it's stable, that is).

RichardET
August 29th, 2013, 02:26 PM
"Buying a Lenovo? Don't get stuck with a wireless card you intend to change later on. Lenovo whitelists their cards so they aren't swappable."

What is whitelisting and how does it apply to Lenovo?

Kevin_Arnold
August 29th, 2013, 04:19 PM
I just started with Ubuntu on the desktop a few weeks ago. I tried other distributions and DE's a few years back but it didn't last very long. Ubuntu with Unity honestly feels like something I can use to replace most of my Windows time at home. I use a Mac at work so I'm used to hopping around to different OSes already.

Overall, I like Unity a lot. I sometimes get the feeling that tech crowds (not just Linux folks) hop on bandwagons pretty easily. A lot of people probably initially "hated" Unity just because they heard other people didn't like it and it wasn't cool to like it. That's not to say that a lot of you probably don't have real issues with it and you're obviously free to prefer something else that works well for you. I just think new folks should give it a shot before hating on it.

Welly Wu
September 1st, 2013, 07:32 PM
The Ubuntu Unity desktop is the most usable out of all the desktop environments that I've tried recently. I like the future direction that it's heading toward and I wish Canonical more good luck in converting more people to switch and use Ubuntu. GNOME 3 is evolving into a workflow that I can't stand and K Desktop Environment is the least used one that I installed because I feel that I spend too much time trying to customize it and it distracts me from getting productive work done. I try to keep an open mind about these things, but the Unity desktop environment can disappear and let me get to real work unobtrusively. One thing that I'll remark upon is that it usually takes two years for Unity to evolve to a point where it's extra stable and reliable. I found the standard releases to be a bit buggy and counterproductive. Unity requires a modern PC to run it smoothly so I tend to buy newer Linux certified notebook PCs every two years just to keep up to date so that I'll have a good user experience.

It's not my absolute favorite, but it's the one that I use the most often. Over time, I let Ubuntu Unity grow on me and I have good opinions about it. Experience has told me to stay away from standard release versions as they are too developmental for my requirements. The killer feature about Unity is the heads up display which I find to be quite useful. I like it quite a lot and I'm looking for a more fully featured HUD and tighter integration with open source software apps that has the legendary stability of a LTS release cycle. HUD is very innovative and useful because it reduces my need to search for specific functions in nested menu systems. It's a brilliant idea that has probably fallen by the wayside. It's a shame because it has tremendous potential. I'm looking forward to voice commands in HUD in the future so I can talk to my PC to make it do things. We shall see if that feature is developed or not.

Don't hate on Ubuntu Unity. It's halfway decent and it's highly usable. I don't see the level of quality and innovation in other desktop environments compared to Unity and I don't see a lot of ISVs developing software applications to integrate into Unity nearly as seamlessly. The one OS desktop environment to rule all form factors and devices is quite intriguing and it simplifies the user experience nicely. I can't wait to get some other Ubuntu devices in the future.

d-cosner
September 1st, 2013, 08:35 PM
Ubuntu 12.04 seems just fine to me. A little tweaking with MyUnity and dconf Editor and 12.04 looks very much like the latest version of Unity. Length of support is important to me. I do not want to reinstall my OS every 6 months so I tend to stay with rolling releases and LTS releases. I just do not see the problems with Unity that some complain about. The only thing that I wish would change is the ability to minimize an app from it's launcher icon, pretty minor though.

I have 12.04 running on 2 systems that I consider very problematic as far as hardware goes but the LTS runs just fine. I enjoyed tweaking and fine tuning Unity to my liking, I even got plymouth to display perfectly on both systems, it was a real chore but it was worth the trouble. For an operating system designed to run on a variety of devices Unity seems like an ideal choice to me. I like developers that think for themselves rather than follow the crowd and the Ubuntu developers are certainly doing that.

Operating system are always going to change and some are not going to like the change, that's just human nature. Unity has some fresh ideas rather than the same old boring thing and I think that appeals to new users. Unity has a modern look and feel and it's pretty nice if a person takes the time to get used to it. I am looking forward to the next LTS release and all of the improvements to Unity. I hope the next LTS is the one Mark Shuttleworth mentioned the "fly in the ice cream" in his keynote speech a while back.

llanitedave
September 2nd, 2013, 03:51 AM
I recently replaced the Xubuntu (It was giving me annoying issues with the update manager) on my desktop with a vanilla Ubuntu 13.04 with Unity. I still have KDE on my laptop. The HUD definitely makes things convenient.

John_McCourt
September 2nd, 2013, 04:03 AM
I didn't like it when it was first made the default WM. It was very buggy and slow. Fortunately its now alot faster and less buggy. Not it's actually usable and very good looking. I was happy with Gnome2 though.

DouglasAdams
September 14th, 2013, 06:13 PM
Please, please, PLEASE give us the option to choose during installation between a very pretty & very flashy DE and a nice simple, very basic DE. Surely that's not too complicated or too much to ask.
It stinks & i HATE it !!

Paddy Landau
September 14th, 2013, 06:30 PM
Please, please, PLEASE give us the option to choose during installation between a very pretty & very flashy DE and a nice simple, very basic DE.
That option already exists.

Instead of downloading Ubuntu, download Xubuntu (http://xubuntu.org/) or, even more basic, Lubuntu (http://lubuntu.net/). Being official Ubuntu flavours, the installation is the same as that for Ubuntu; because the repositories are shared, you still have access to all of your favourite applications.

If you don't like Unity, don't use Ubuntu. Use Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org/) (also an official distro but with a fancy interface), or one of the unofficial distros such as Mint (http://www.linuxmint.com/) and Bodhi (http://bodhilinux.com/), which also share the repositories.

deadflowr
September 14th, 2013, 07:30 PM
Please, please, PLEASE give us the option to choose during installation between a very pretty & very flashy DE and a nice simple, very basic DE. Surely that's not too complicated or too much to ask.
It stinks & i HATE it !!

Which is which?

I find unity to be almost too basic.

Paddy Landau
September 14th, 2013, 07:53 PM
I find unity to be almost too basic.
LOL, me too. I love Unity for its speed and simplicity.

monkeybrain20122
September 14th, 2013, 08:21 PM
I've gone full circle with Unity and then some. I hated it, loved it, and now I'm kind of in the middle. I like using the dash as a launcher, but it's not exactly as quick as I would like it, even with high end hardware.
.

It is slow only for the first time you use it after a reboot, but after that it is fast. That goes with every program (Firefox, gimp whatever) I suppose it takes time to initialize for a new session. I use only mid range hardware

(Don't know if it has anything to do with it, but Ubuntu 13.04 boots very fast and log in is almost instantaneous even comparing to other Linuxes I have tried on the same machine(s) (Manjaro and Debian may boot a little faster but take much longer to log in), so maybe it shortens the log in time by delaying initializing certain things, such as the dash)

DouglasAdams
September 14th, 2013, 10:55 PM
That option already exists.

Instead of downloading Ubuntu, download Xubuntu (http://xubuntu.org/) or, even more basic, Lubuntu (http://lubuntu.net/). Being official Ubuntu flavours, the installation is the same as that for Ubuntu; because the repositories are shared, you still have access to all of your favourite applications.

If you don't like Unity, don't use Ubuntu. Use Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org/) (also an official distro but with a fancy interface), or one of the unofficial distros such as Mint (http://www.linuxmint.com/) and Bodhi (http://bodhilinux.com/), which also share the repositories.

Xubuntu & Lubuntu are NOT the same as Ubuntu without the de. Those distros come with totally different apps. Apps that i don't like. I want the real apps, such as LibreOffice, that come as standard with Ubnutu. The ONLY thing i don't want is the de.

As for installing, say, Lubuntu then adding all the Ubuntu apps:
1) it's a pain in the ...
2) you end-up with two sets of apps, e.g. two file managers, and that causes problems.
After i installed Ubuntu 13.04 i added the LDXE de. Now some programs seem to think that i'm not using Ubuntu; some report it as a "non-standard" system; a few even error. Great solution!

Why is everyone so frightened of offering a nice simple de, such as LXDE, as an alternative? Now that Ubuntu doesn't fit on a cd it can't be a space problem. Could it possibly be they know that most people would opt for the less flashy de?

Let me give you another reason. I help a few people who didn't do too well with formal education. Some find it very difficult to handle the Ubuntu menu. Some simply find it confusing. Yet none have any problems with the more "static" menus of LXDE or XFCE and icons for apps they use most often on their desktop. Surely no-one would suggest that they should be stuck with the "lesser" apps of L or X.

Realy, would a choice be such a bad thing?

montag dp
September 14th, 2013, 11:17 PM
Xubuntu & Lubuntu are NOT the same as Ubuntu without the de. Those distros come with totally different apps. Apps that i don't like. I want the real apps, such as LibreOffice, that come as standard with Ubnutu. The ONLY thing i don't want is the de.

As for installing, say, Lubuntu then adding all the Ubuntu apps:
1) it's a pain in the ...
2) you end-up with two sets of apps, e.g. two file managers, and that causes problems.
After i installed Ubuntu 13.04 i added the LDXE de. Now some programs seem to think that i'm not using Ubuntu; some report it as a "non-standard" system; a few even error. Great solution!

Why is everyone so frightened of offering a nice simple de, such as LXDE, as an alternative? Now that Ubuntu doesn't fit on a cd it can't be a space problem. Could it possibly be they know that most people would opt for the less flashy de?

Let me give you another reason. I help a few people who didn't do too well with formal education. Some find it very difficult to handle the Ubuntu menu. Some simply find it confusing. Yet none have any problems with the more "static" menus of LXDE or XFCE and icons for apps they use most often on their desktop. Surely no-one would suggest that they should be stuck with the "lesser" apps of L or X.

Realy, would a choice be such a bad thing?You might be happy with Linux Mint then. It has a more familiar style default user interface and comes with most of the same apps you will find in Ubuntu. Generally, though when you go to a different distro, the default apps are not going to be exactly the same. If there is a particular one that doesn't come standard with a certain distro, you can always install it later.

Alternatively, you can install one of the other desktop shells (XFCE, LXDE, KDE, GNOME, etc.) on top of your standard Ubuntu installation. This will allow you to keep all your programs. The only problem is, they will probably install a bunch of other programs, too. For instance, if you install KDE on top of Ubuntu, you will probably have Nautilus and Dolphin available as file managers, Evince and Okular as PDF readers, etc.

As to your questions why they don't include another interface by default, you'd have to take that up with them. This isn't really the place to contact developers.

DouglasAdams
September 14th, 2013, 11:26 PM
You might be happy with Linux Mint then. It has a more familiar style default user interface and comes with most of the same apps you will find in Ubuntu. Generally, though when you go to a different distro, the default apps are not going to be exactly the same. If there is a particular one that doesn't come standard with a certain distro, you can always install it later.

i am happy with all the apps that come with ubuntu.
tried mint, didn't like it. all i can remember now is that i kept having problems with my cloud.

what is the big problem witb offering an alternative de?

llanitedave
September 14th, 2013, 11:28 PM
What's the big problem with simply installing one?